My self importance is saving me
Everything feels fucked right now, in very thorough ways. This election and all of the personal and professional strife surrounding it makes it feel like I’m living in the end of days, some weird postapocalyptic scenario where the wrath of God is just around the corner.
After my last blog, I took a step back in order to reorient myself and try to make sense of it all. I was recently a respondent on a virtual panel on race and social justice for a conference that was originally supposed to take place in my home state. I’ve been to many academic conferences-it comes with the territory when you do what I do. As with any other conference they are meant to be a site for networking and learning new developments in my field, but I generally use it as a chance to drink heavily and hang out with friends I haven't seen in ages. The last few conferences I've been to have drained me for a variety of reasons and conference life in general is sitting in panels and hoping they're engaging. I go, meet up with peeps, learn some shit, then head home tired. And that's usually it. But for whatever reason, I felt…inspired after this conference. Maybe it was that I wasn’t the only brown person speaking. Maybe it was the fact that people liked what I had to say. Or perhaps it was the fact that I was receiving validation from my peers. Hell, it could’ve been the fact that I gained a bunch of followers on Twitter (like maybe 10, but that’s a lot to me). Either way, that was the point where I started to feel inspired. Around that same time, my wife was talking about how I should go back to the more theory-driven work I’d been talking about for years.
I’m the kind of person who has lived a life of quiet desperation in that I don’t like to project my wants or desires out into the universe. I don’t do the whole “secret” thing because I’ve always felt that I would be setting myself up for failure; there’s a certain power to announcing and saying aloud what you intend to do. If you think back to those ancient Athenian auditoriums where philosophers, sophists and rhetoricians would speak to students and government officials, they were always designed in ways to center the speaker and project the voice. They (the Athenian Greeks) believed in kairos: simply put, it’s the idea that the right time and circumstance (place, setting, company) are just as important as the words or choices you make. Traditional rhetoricians lazily mutated that concept to mean that a good speaker/orator takes advantage of the moment to be a good speaker, but newer theorists argue that kairos actually compels you. It’s the other way around: the circumstance reveals itself and gently nudges you towards an action or a statement. This is not to say that you don’t have agency; rather, it's the good rhetor that will attune themselves to kairos and actually listen rather than ignore it.
Right now kairos is compelling me to keep going with my writing. I’m at that moment where my brain is moving from a stop to a slow churn. I’ve been feeling a restlessness that I’ve not felt in...who knows when. It's a good kind of unease where, when I get into a rhythm of writing I rock back and forth in my chair every time I pause to think about what I've written. When I'm not writing, I'm anxious to get back to work writing and just offloading ideas onto OneNote or GoogleDocs or this god damn Wordpress site. And I want to give reverence to this kairotic moment and treat it with the respect it deserves; I’ve been journaling more and even ordered a mechanical keyboard in the hopes that the tactile sensation will further encourage me to write. I figure that it’s a tool of my trade so why not invest in it?
Baby's first mechanical keyboard. Already have my eye on another...
All of that to say, I’m ready to admit that I’ve started working on a book proposal. I’m returning to some of the work I’ve already done and connecting it to things I’ve been reading recently. I don’t want to say too much about it quite yet, only that it’s prescient and involves the movement of people and capital. I’ll be ready to say more once the proposal is finished, but right now I have to finish a couple of other things first – namely, an article I’m 90 percent done with and awaiting feedback on and another article I’m co-authoring with a friend and colleague of mine that is likely 75 percent finished.
I want to be better at what I do. I’ve never had a problem believing in my own capabilities, but have lived a life of either a) coasting through, or b) actively fucking myself so that I don't need to actually try. But as the end of times rapidly approaches I want to be blatant and intentional and, frankly, cavalier about this. I want to see my name on a cover of a book. I want to know that I went through editors and publishers and manuscript edits and at an actual artifact that I can hold in my hand and say, "that was me. I did that." In all other aspects of my life I am a certified self deprecating motherfucker, so please allow me this one space where I can actually lean into my own self belief. I know
This book will get done.