On Monday I finshed a (long-overdue) chapter for an academic handbook on placemaking. I outlined the thing months ago—almost half a year ago, in fact—but then life happened (and then the virus happened), and it got shunted onto the backburner. And so when I came to actually cranking the thing out, a process which I started on Saturday, I pretty much had to reconstruct it wholesale from a list of bullet points and sketched references which it seemed that someone else had written (albeit a someone else who knows a great deal about my field and my work and my theory). The first of three sections was about as much fun as ploughing a concrete field with a rusty Soviet-era tractor, but the other two came more easily. Unusually for me, I only overran my wordcount by about 20%… but given I know that’s just how I work, and given I know that the editors will inevitably want to cut a bunch of stuff, I just filed it on Monday night with the overrun, and with the intention of fixing it when the rewrite request comes in.

Then came a day of what I think of as a form of post-partum depression (with apologies to anyone who can or has actually given birth, for what may be a distasteful metaphor coming from a cis-man). For as long as I’ve been writing, the completion and submission of a work is always followed by a period in which I loathe what I’ve just released into the world, and loathe myself for having created it. I think it was perhaps exacerbated yesterday by the more general circumstances, which are stressful and angsty to say the least, but it’s a familiar thing now—and I guess the familiarity makes it easier to deal with, as does the relative stability of my life compared that from which earlier work emerged. (Submitting my PhD thesis destroyed me for about a fortnight, for instance—as did both sets of corrections. And my story “Los Piratas…”—OMG, don’t even go there. I think it worked out well in the end, but it was a horribly self-destructive act of creation.)

This is mostly a note-to-self: I spent most of yesterday reading work by other people online, people doing what seems to be an amazing job of thinking through the current situation, collating ideas and citations and themes into admirably coherent examinations of the issues… and, perhaps most importantly, producing. Everything I read just made me feel like a monstrous fake, a fraud.

Classic imposter syndrome, amirite? Not to mention an internalisation of the neoliberal logic of valuing oneself through the lens of arbitrary and ulitimately unquantifiable metrics of productivity. I managed to deal with it, in the end, by sitting down and cranking out an outline for the next piece of long-overdue writing that’s in the pipeline… as I just remarked to C, you’ve gotta get back on the horse after it’s thrown you, right? I worry that by doing so I’m effectively doubling down on the neoliberalisation-of-the-self thing… but given the enduring inescapability of that ideological context, I guess there’s not much to be done about it. More immediately, however, it’s good to know that there’s a way of dealing with the self-doubt that still accompanies any significant act of creation on my part—which I knew already, in a way, but which I somehow still forget every time.

The point of the work is the work.