Writing Emotions 5: Excitement
excitement (noun) – feeling of great enthusiasm and eagerness
Before you start writing your dissertation, you’re in the prospectus phase. You get a little time (I took about a year) to come up with a dissertation topic. I was so excited at the beginning. Arthur Little told me that this was a rare time in our careers; he said that this might be the last time that things feel wide open until later in the career. Side note: I have always felt free, even with the anxiety this career provokes, so I have consistently felt my field of vision was wide open. That, I think, is a product of faith and, quite frankly, Arthur’s insistence that we should feel it even if others are trying to take it away.
Anyway, I was so thrilled when I had a cohesive idea. I sat down at a lunch table outside Northern Lights café on UCLA’s upper campus. I thought I was among three friends. I was really only among one. Let me explain: I started explaining and the two women sitting next to me went in hard on why my idea was incomplete. Hard in the paint. Your project relies too much cultural nationalism. Your project doesn’t do enough Marxist analysis. How does phenomenology even work for Black people? You still haven’t explained why Arabs and Blacks should be in conversation aside from Islam. Mind you, I didn’t know anything about their projects and neither of them had my area of specialty (either in terms of embodiment or expertise).
The woman across from me, still one of my favorite people, took off her sunglasses so she could look me in the eye and give them sidelong looks of disapproval. Her intervention worked someone, but I still felt deflated. My excitement had been punctured. I felt like one of those big shiny balloons that suddenly started bobbing closer to the floor instead of waving enthusiastically in the air.
It was only after I defended my dissertation prospectus that I had my excitement back. Once I had it, I had to protect it and cultivate it. I stayed away from extensive conversations about my work with those other two women. I stayed tied to my favorite people. I delved into the parts of the project to which I gravitated most easily. I also tried not to chastise myself for feeling excitement. In other words, I tried to create community, habituate excitement, and embrace myself.
That last part – that right there – that is the hardest part. Sometimes, naked enthusiasm isn’t a safe emotion to show. I’ll say this up front: I might be biased based on my own experiences. That said, I have seen academics tear a new idea to shreds when it and the scholar who created it is at its most tender and vulnerable. Excitement is both the catalyst and the engine behind a lot of the work we do. When it is deflated, the work cannot be done except under duress.
Two anecdotes:
I was at a conference – African Literature Association in 2015 – where the audience members began with “The problem with your paper is….” In that setting, this kind of feedback was both expected and encouraged. But, there were limits. When someone went on in what could only be described as a verbal screed, other audience members let that person know – in body language and verbally – that they had nothing useful to say. The rule was that the direct nature of the comment was supposed to cultivate excitement. One was not allowed to be randomly rude. Those rules were understood and followed.
At the College Language Association 2014 conference, I watched a senior scholar gently push a junior scholar to consider an alternative point of view. It was so gentle that the person’s dismissal prompted a response from me that was two parts warning, one part encouragement. The senior scholar actively eschewed the honor that comes with being a senior scholar at CLA by being gentle. The junior scholar’s dismissal violated one of the tenets of CLA: always listen and respect senior scholars and never dismiss them. CLA is one of the few places where junior scholars and senior scholars are actively encouraged to try new work, experiment with their scholarship, and present new ideas. It is one of the most generous places to be.
I may have mentioned that I have never been too cool for school. You’ll never hear me say “well that’s just…” or “basically…” Those responses tend to, in my mind, reduce a scholar’s ideas to rubble, minimizing their importance.
Keep your excitement. Keep it close. Cultivate it. Enjoy it.