Joycelyn Moody - JMoody's Musings

​My December column about planning physical and mental rest included this sentence: “Folks, I am finally what not saying ‘No’ often enough, what being one soldier in a tiny army waging war against anti-Blackness, looks like.”
 
This month, I want to reflect on some of the ideas I crammed into that packed sentence. I’ve felt vulnerable since publishing it. The sentence has stayed with me; it’s crept into my driving quiet, and eased into my meditation. I feel like the image of “not saying no often enough” has me looking rough. My partner says I still look all right. But since Thanksgiving, I’ve had one respiratory illness after another, so I look and feel tired.
 
Treating my chronic fatigue ironically adds three 2-hour training appointments to my week: I’m working out like a dynamo to increase my energy level. If I want to be a soldier in anybody’s army, I need more strength. Anyone who plans to fight against xenophobia and inequality needs a hella lot of strength. And a lotta big sticks.
 
Thankfully, I’m not alone in this army, outnumbered though we ultimately are. Other minoritized faculty women—and our shrewd allies—are also fighting against race-based hatred. Sistah-soldiers share their stories of struggle and grief with me all the time. Most are overcommitted in the ways that led to my own need for deliberate rest. which is to say, they need rest, too.
 
An insight I’ve had recently—and I realize I’m late recognizing this point—is that I keep forgetting that our army is tiny. I probably forget it because we are so mighty. We are powerful. But for all my own literal and figurative strength-training—physical therapy, home, meditation, massage, sister-friendships, and so on—I wore myself out trying to multiply myself on the job, trying to do the work of five faculty sistahs when I am only one person.
 
There aren’t enough of us minoritized feminist academics. There are not enough faculty women of color to represent us in all the classrooms and boardrooms, on all the committees and platforms where we want our collective perspectives and issues to be raised.
 
A friend reached out to me the other day. I’ll call her Sheila, though that’s not her real name. Sheila is a Black woman professor who desperately wanted to assist another mutual sistah-colleague of ours.
 
Aside: Our numbers are so small that it’s actually hard to narrate this experience without worrying that I’ll inadvertently include some details that will reveal the identity of one or the other of these dear friends. In fact, that’s a worry Roxanne and I experience each time we publish a WellAcademic™ newsletter: will our anecdotes unwittingly disclose the identities of the professionals who trust us, given that our focused readerships are so small?
 
I first became aware of progressive feminist research into this area circa 1995, and I’m discouraged that the demographics of educational institutions remain pretty much the same. It’s a shame that the minoritized women in the academy I know are separated by maybe four, hardly six, degrees. Many of us know each other by name and lineage. We are each other’s teachers, students, mentors, coaches, coauthors, and kin. Systemic poverty and racialized evil keep our numbers low. (One way of generating more of us would be the development of more pipeline programs like the African American Literature & Culture Institute. Call that self-promotion if you want, but I call it begging you to do what you can to replicate yourself, too.)
 
Back to Sheila. She is a proud person who rarely speaks her stress levels, but in a recent phone call, her voice was strained and tight. Even more oddly, she actually ticked off out loud some of the faculty tasks almost overwhelming her. The year is young—it’s still January as I write this post—so I’m worried about Sheila, concerned she could be following me down the road to chronic fatigue.
 
And now Sheila was calling on me to bless the fact that she’d agreed to support another sistah-colleague. Been there, bloody heart in both hands extended and determined to help.
 
I both wanted to encourage Sheila for her willingness to help our sister and to throw up the STOP sign. How to move forward in moments like this is always complicated. Do we take care of ourselves? Do we care for our sistahs? No easy answers--only hard questions and harder answers.
 
So, I offered Sheila a few suggestions for ways she might assist our other friend, a sister who—needless to say—genuinely deserves the support she was seeking. Sheila responded with gratitude but also with dismay. It was her groan that prompted me to reassure her she could relieve herself of the commitment; she could, in fact, she should, say no to our girlfriend this time because there aren’t enough of us.
 
“You don’t have to do that for her now.”
 
Saying no would be more than all right; it would be best. It would save Sheila to fight in our stalwart army another day. And saying no would help keep our numbers rested and ready.
 
There simply aren’t enough of us yet, no matter how much we want to support each other’s projects, to assist each other in the work we do for the ultimate goal of exposing injustice and righting the immoralities of the institutions where we work. We educate our hearts out to produce an intelligent, informed, and righteous citizenry, but our numbers remain low anyway. We are not to blame for our small populations.
 
A surge of relief surprised me head-to-toe when Sheila readily embraced this last suggestion. She’d already intuited we minoritized women faculty owe it to ourselves to say no even to each other from time to time.
 
Such a choice is rarely simple in the injurious academy. Our socialization teaches it’s “selfish,” maybe “unsisterly.” Yet I don’t want another woman faculty of color ever to feel herself a doleful image of “not saying ‘No’ often enough.” Careful self-preservation will remain essential as long as there simply aren’t enough of us.
 
Until next time,

​​By Nichole Guillory (WellAcademic Guest Blogger) - Mothering in Color

We are in the middle of annual reviews, which means we have been busy documenting what we have “accomplished” in the areas of research, teaching, and service in the last year and describing the quality and significance of that work. We rate ourselves in each of the three areas, and our department chairs also rate our work as exceeding, meeting, or below expectations.  

I know what you’re thinking: annual reviews are a function of neoliberal audit culture in higher education settings, where increasingly across the U.S., professors have to “prove effectiveness,” some might say prove our worth.

For faculty women of color, annual review time can be especially stressful. Student evaluations do not always reflect the effectiveness of our teaching and instead reflect how racism and sexism intersect to influence students’ perceptions. Faculty women of color whose research is situated in marginalized disciplines (like critical race feminism) also may have a harder time demonstrating quality and significance of our publications using traditional measures (like impact factor of journals). Sometimes the service faculty women of color do that supports our institutions’ diversity missions, like mentoring of students of color and supporting other women of color colleagues, is invisible labor which does not get counted fully.

For a long time (before and after earning tenure, by the way), I put pressure on myself (and way too much time) into annual reviews. With my research, teaching, and service situated in marginalized education fields, my focus was often on “convincing” my superiors that my work was as good as the work of my colleagues in traditional disciplinary fields. Because the academy has historically recognized as legitimate only a few indicators of quality and significance, a higher bar exists for demonstrating how my work “measures up.” This higher bar, and all the extra work it requires for a successful annual review, takes a lot of time and emotional energy.

Explaining my teaching evaluations in a larger context of research on Black women faculty teaching diversity courses, providing additional documentation to demonstrate how big of an impact my scholarship is having in my field, justifying how mentoring of students and colleagues from historically marginalized groups is more time-consuming and energy-depleting than regular service yet still so essential to the health of the university, and proving that my public scholarship (the blogpost you’re reading now, for instance) is indeed scholarship and deserves to be “counted”—all of this extra labor for annual reviews is not uncommon for faculty members who do “diversity” work. We understand the costs when we make these commitments, but even with this knowledge, having to count and measure and justify and prove our “value” to the university can still be dehumanizing.

To counter this effect, I made some changes over the last five years in how I approach annual reviews. I view my annual review for what it should be: an opportunity to stop and take stock of all that I have done over the past year; to think about how my work is aligned with my pedagogical commitments, especially related to social justice; and determine what adjustments I need to make in the upcoming year so that my work is more integrated and purposeful.

The most difficult change was developing a different framework for and attitude toward annual reviews—and I’m still a work in progress. I resist seeing the review as my one shot at proving that my work and I matter in the space.
I know that I matter, I know that the work I do matters, and I know that my mattering is never going to be measurable using the means that institutions privilege. I am no longer looking for ratings on an annual review to tell me how effective I am as a teacher, researcher, and colleague; what to do more of, what to do less of; or how close I am to what sometimes seems like a moving bar. The bar I set for myself is always going to be higher than one set for me, and sometimes this has meant that I don’t earn the highest scores.

I’ve made some practical adjustments as well that I invite readers to consider.

First, I set a timer to the work I do completing annual reviews. A very firm timer. I give the task no more time than this. No exceptions.

Second, I use my own template which has sections with reusable content and sections that I fill in with new stats each year, and so far, this template works with the university template I am required to use.

Third, I set goals for research, teaching, and service in 2-3 year increments, so I don’t write new ones until I have achieved these or until they change after this window of time has passed.

Lastly, I know what my university’s handbook says is required of department chairs and me in this process, which can be helpful especially when department chairs change frequently.

I also learned from Roxanne to schedule a session to work on annual reviews with a couple of colleagues who do similar work so that you can create statements of quality and significance together.

Even though I’ve made changes over a number of years prior to my recent promotion to full professor, I understand that being able to work around some institutional norms is a function of my privileged position in the academy. I also understand that my individual approach to changing my mindset around annual reviews is not going to solve a more systemic problem nationally, where evaluation of professors has become increasingly more high stakes. But I have effected change for myself, which is sometimes all we can do for ourselves.

I also invite administrators to use the approach of my current department chair—shout out to Dr. Anete Vasquez. She added a humanizing frame to the annual review process by sending an email to faculty members acknowledging that review meetings often trigger the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) and stating her intent to trigger our parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest). To do this, she gave us a brief set of questions to answer in advance of our meeting which asked us to reflect on what was working—a strengths-based model—in our teaching, research, and service, and to offer solutions if we noted any problems.

She also stated that we would work collaboratively in our meeting to draft the letter together—with ratings in each area—that accompanied my annual review to the next level. In my meeting with her, she asked me to help her make a case for positive ratings, which sparked a conversation about my accomplishments the previous year. I never felt like I was defending my work. Instead, my work was understood, and I felt acknowledged.

I hope you’ve found a way—big or small—to use what agency you have to make annual reviews more formative and less high stakes, generative and not destructive, and collegial not adversarial. That’s what we deserve after all the work we’ve done throughout the year.  

Author

Nichole Guillory, PhD, is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Kennesaw State University. She publishes on the experiences of women of color in the academy. She is mom to Nicholas, the love of her life. We couldn't be happier that she has agreed to pen the Mothering in Color series for WellAcademic.

By Roxanne Donovan - Wellness

Feeling especially overwhelmed? More exhausted than normal by unfinished grading and writing? Wondering why spring break wasn't refreshing? You’re not alone.

Spring semester is a major slog. Even worse than fall. No, really. Here’s why: 

Spring comes after the holiday season, which for some means depletion from travel, forced cheer, and overspending worries. For those who don’t celebrate Christmas, there’s the extra stress of dealing with even more Christian privilege than usual. How many times could you hear Merry Christmas as a non-Christian without wanting to scream?

Some parts of the U.S. experience little sunlight and lots of cold during most of spring semester, particularly the start. This can have emotional consequences that range from malaise to Seasonal Affective Disorder. Even if shorter, darker, chillier days don’t get you down, they may negatively affect your friends, family, students, and colleagues. And their down mood can impact yours, a phenomenon called emotional contagion.

Taxes are due! Need I say more?

Then there are faculty annual reviews that typically occur in the spring. Ideally, professional reviews are a time for thoughtful reflection with chairs who: value all that we do; make space for the ways positionality influences how we are perceived, treated, and evaluated*; acknowledge that we operate within an education system that increasingly gives too little and takes too much; recognize their power in the process even if they feel powerless in their roles otherwise; and understand that those reading their reviews are people with feelings and vulnerabilities and hopes, even if some of us protect those parts of our humanity behind heavy armor. 

But as many of you already know, annual reviews regularly fall short of this ideal. So far short, in fact, that I’ve had a steady stream of painful phone calls and meetings with faculty from all kinds of institutions demoralized by their review process. These are exceptional faculty who work tirelessly for their students, colleagues, and colleges. Yet shifting standards, the application of previously unmentioned expectations, and the minimization, or even outright dismissal, of considerable intellectual, physical, and, oftentimes, invisible emotional labor marked their interactions.

There is no clear win among the fallacious choices available to those faced with this situation. They can:

1. Use their  last scraps of energy to argue further for possible greater recognition of their labor, which risks both retaliation and relationship fractures; or
2. Keep the peace and accept what they know is unjust, opening them to the pain that silence in the face of attack brings, as well as possible negative financial and promotion and tenure repercussions.

And these costs are not equally distributed. Those who are junior, belong to historically marginalized groups, challenge injustice on or off campus, have chronic health challenges, are without strong supportive networks, occupy vulnerable emotional spaces, or sit at the intersection of these factors are poised to suffer more regardless of “choice.” All from one process that has the potential to be affirming, healing, and motivating.  

My intention is not to depress. It’s to shed light on the ways environmental, systemic, and institutional agents can influence our spring semesters, and lives in general, sometimes outside of our awareness. And I mean to challenge flawed cultural narratives that link success (and failure) solely to individual, personal efforts. If only life were so simple and magical that we really did have full control over our destiny.

It isn’t. We don’t. And buying into this belief can seriously hamper well-being.  

A healthier alternative is to acknowledge the agents at play. Accept that they have the strength to impact our lives…that they can show up like hurricane force winds pushing us off course or like an almost imperceptible but relentless headwind that slows us down or makes keeping pace exhausting.

Surrounding yourself with those who truly see you, hear you, and value you for all that you are is necessary shelter when winds are raging and can shield a headwind’s full impact. Finding those communities in systems that instill distrust among and within us is not easy. But know that it’s possible. [For more strategies, see Nichole Guillory's Surviving The Annual Review Process post.]

Awkward plug: Adding to these rare compassionate spaces is why Joycelyn and I created our wellness retreat for women of color faculty. The need for replenishment at spring’s end prompted us to offer a retreat in May as well as November.

Let me close by saying that acknowledging the external forces that might be making your spring semester hellish is not an invitation to give up on the semester or lose sight of your own power. It is an invitation for radical self-care. And seeing what society is adept at invisiblizing is pretty damn radical.

In peace and solidarity,

*If you need evidence to support that positionality matters in teaching evaluations, see here and here.

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By Roxanne Donovan - Wellness

January is the start of a new calendar year, a new semester, and, for me, a new year of life (my birthday is January 20th). Those are a lot of rebirths packed into just 31 days. That's  probably why reflection comes naturally this month. I start with all the things I'm grateful for. The list is long. Along with the big things, I include everyday things that can easily be missed, such as seeing the sunrise when I drive my kids to school way too early in the morning.
 
Yet, even with this long list, I know more can be done to slow down and appreciate life as it comes. The need to do so is becoming more and more urgent as I get older and realize the fragility of time. Each day is a gift with no guarantee of another. A sobering thought to be sure, but also one that frees me to think more about how I want to live the days I'm lucky enough to have.
 
The answer this January was clear: less busyness, more nothing. 
 
Let me explain. I'm a bit of an efficiency hack. I manage to squeeze as much out of my work hours as humanly possible so I can spend my personal time off-the-grid with family. That means I am on when working, moving from task to task with laser focus. You can even find me responding to emails as I wait in the kids' school carpool line or on a conference call as I drive home from work (using a hands-free device, of course).
 
The drawback is I'm never off during work hours, never doing nothing, which is horrible for creativity and health. As a psychologist, I know this, but I'm also a member of a culture that prizes busyness and that cultural pull is strong. Moreover, I'm a woman of color in unjust systems which creates a complicated individual and institutional/systemic interplay around perfectionism and overwork.
 
This year, though, I'm going to try hard to swim against this cultural tide. I have to. Time won't slow down for me, so I must slow down for it. To do that, I'm choosing to create space in my day and my life where I do absolutely nothing.
 
What does this nothingness look like?

• No more working in airports or on planes
• Doing nothing on the drive home
• Doing nothing in the carpool line
• No more work (or anything else) over lunch
• Doing nothing for at least 10 minutes when transitioning between work tasks 
• When writing, stopping every hour or so for 5 to 10 minutes to do absolutely nothing

 
As I boarded my flight to Denver for a psych conference in January, I was kicking myself for starting this do-nothing journey then. I'd be in the air for almost four hours with a pile of work on a plane that actually had functioning WiFi. It took all my willpower not to take my laptop out of the bag.
 
Then I sat down...next to the most amazing person. We talked the entire flight. I provided some advice to help with a painful family issue and received thoughtful guidance about a professional problem I was tackling. I even got a follow-up email about how my suggestions had worked to initiate the very beginnings of healing for the family. This deeply memorable encounter would have been impossible had my head been buried in a laptop. Thank you universe. I receive your gift. 
 
Whatever your belief system, this is your one shot in this body on this planet in this moment. None of us will live forever. However, all of us can work in whatever ways we're able to cultivate lives of meaning. One small step toward that goal is to slow down and do a bit of nothing each day. I invite you to give it a try.

In peace and solidarity,

For more reflections, follow me on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.

​By Nichole Guillory (WellAcademic Guest Blogger) - Mothering in Color

I lost a colleague from this side of the heavens on December 28, 2018. I said my last goodbye in person on December 19th, nine days before her passing, and I knew then that the end was probably near though I hoped for a different result. So I knew when our mutual friend texted in the very early hours of December 28th what the sad news was before I even returned the call.

Charlease Kelly-Jackson was 42 years young. A fierce mom of two. A loving daughter. A loyal sister in a family full of brothers. And a badass scholar in the STEM world.

Before I wax nostalgic about our relationship, let me be clear that my post is not meant as a tribute piece. I could never properly capture Charlease’s impact. Furthermore, tributes are often written by those who are closest to the deceased. I do not want to exaggerate our closeness. I find it offensive after someone’s passing when folks mischaracterize relationships. We did not have a girlfriend’s type of friendship. We never took a trip, had drinks after hours, went to the nail salon, or did retail therapy together. I characterize our relationship of several years in a different way.

I call myself her older academic sister—though her footprint in the field of STEM grants outsized us all. And this is the relationship I wish to highlight in this post. I remember our first lunch; a colleague who knew us both separately thought I might be able to ease her transition to our university—this place can be culture shock for even the most seasoned academics.

I don’t know if I eased her transition with the advice I gave that day, but we became closer as a result of some mentoring through her tenure and promotion process. In the last few years, I have found that mentoring, especially as it relates to getting underrepresented faculty tenured and promoted, is one way to advance my commitment to social justice.

We developed our professional relationship through our work with a small group of public schools our college partnered with; she worked at the elementary schools and I worked at the high school. We both felt at home in these schools, working to better prepare teachers for “our” kids. I pride myself on knowing how to work respectfully and thoughtfully with teachers, families, and communities. But Charlease had me beat. Every. Single. Time. She had five schools, I only had one. We often joked that we worked with our teacher colleagues much more easily than our university colleagues.

Our closeness came through countless phone calls. I can hear her fast talking now.

Guillory, you got a minute? I have a situation and I need your advice…
 
Guillory, am I making too much out of…

Guillory, let me read this email to you so you can tell me how to respond before I go off…

Guillory, have you worked with such and such before? She’s asked me to do a grant with her…

Let me pause here to say that many women of color in the academy will be familiar with the topics of these exchanges. They come from having to navigate a higher education system where our experiences, regardless of institution, go something like this: Woman of color enters the academic space. Woman of color works and works and works some more. Woman of color is dismissed/devalued/disrespected. Rinse and repeat.

Women of color find myriad ways to survive this cycle, and one important strategy is to seek support from other women of color who have traveled our same path. We offer advice, an encouraging place to land, and knowing affirmation while we help each other make sense of our individual experiences within a system that too often diminishes our humanity.

Charlease was not always receptive to my suggestions, but she always accepted them. We had this familiar process. She called for advice. I’d give advice. She’d argue with me about the advice. I reminded her that she called me for the advice, and I’d ask her again if she really wanted it. After she was less mad, she’d tell me that her mom told her to do the same thing that I had just suggested. And I always reminded her that her academic big sister might not always be right, but her mama always was. 

And then there were the heads-up phone calls. You know how we do. We call each other to share important information which helps us to navigate an unexpected or difficult situation because there’s never a shortage of struggle for women of color in toxic, oppressive academic spaces.

And then there were the calls for the last two and a half years that were mostly about her cancer, its effect on her children, and the full-time battle she waged on top of an already over-full plate. She kept me informed—I feel privileged that she trusted me to know some of what she went through at each stage of a new treatment plan, a new clinical trial, another doctor’s opinion.

I wish for any one of those calls now. I wish she was on this side of the heavens. As is often the case in the aftermath of death, you reach clarity, which has been the case with me too. What seemed big at work before I left for the holiday break seems really small now, so inconsequential in comparison, especially when I think about Charlease’s family.

And perhaps this is why I felt compelled to write this post. To make a public promise to continue to mentor others in her name. To answer the late night call to dictate an email that settles a stressful situation before morning, to weigh options when a new work request comes through, to mirror someone’s worth back to her, to pay forward all the laughs we had together.

And to remind us—and myself especially—that mentoring relationships have a lasting impact on the mentor too. 

Author

Nichole Guillory, PhD, is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Kennesaw State University. She publishes on the experiences of women of color in the academy. She is mom to Nicholas, the love of her life. We couldn't be happier that she has agreed to pen the Mothering in Color series for WellAcademic.

By Joycelyn Moody - JMoody's Musings

Innately, I’m a thinker and planner. As an academic, professor, researcher, author, editor, and entrepreneur—not to mention mate and mother—I’ve designed plans for all sorts of institutions and organizations. I’m also a coach in part because I love saying, “What I/we/you need to do is….”
 
But it turns out I don’t know how to rest. Recently, I happened on Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s book Rest—OK, OK: “I admit I am powerless over lay productivity studies–that my obsession with happiness psychology and neuroscience for amateurs has become unmanageable.” Until Pang, I didn’t even know one needed to plan to rest. For all my knowledge as a teacher and scholar and as a professional coach, I have to learn how to rest if I’m going to restore my energy. Which I now admit, too, I need to do.
 
I was in the bookstore a few nights before Christmas to buy a Scrabble™ game. A friend had agreed to try out a new ziti recipe for me if I’d also let him beat me at Scrabble. I’m lousy at most board and parlor games, so I’m inured to losing. Stunningly uninspired to fight to win. The ziti was my prize, so getting whupped at Scrabble™, Shit Happens™, Spades, any game—well, yawn.
 
Once upon a time, I was competitive. I’d be like, “C’mon!” and “Bring it!” Once the poster child of high accomplishments, I am worn out. Folks, I am finally what not saying “No” often enough, what being one soldier of a tiny army raging against anti-Blackness, looks like. I couldn’t take on another task if I wanted, and in the haze of this malaise, I don’t want to. I’m shedding responsibilities like nobody’s business (that’s a pun). You couldn’t pay me to _____. If my life depended on it, I couldn’t _____. You get the idea.
 
And now I am even saddled with the work of planning deliberate rest, if I am to follow what seems the common sense—wisdom, really—of Pang’s book, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. (Note my critiques, though: Pang, who cites the restoration processes of numerous White, male creative persons, doesn’t seem to have met even one poor or Black person or working woman ever, and throughout Rest, mind-wandering is advocated more than mindfulness; notably, meditation doesn’t appear in the index.) I urgently need to return to the Elohee Center and Bald Mountain and our WellAcademic retreat in the worst way. And I’ll get back there next May.
 
Meanwhile, I am resting and wrestling with Pang’s concepts of “deliberate rest” and “deep play.” Pang defines the latter as sustained rest in scheduled creative activities involving physical movement such as sailing, skiing, landscape painting, foreign traveling, or mountain climbing. Uh-huh, my new hobbies might be more like finally creating a household budget we can stick to and dragging a Black woman friend with me to join the local group meditation center, to recover from over-exertion, to rehabilitate.
 
Deliberate rest takes the less costly form of planned, conscientious, significant time away from whatever constitutes one’s work, again rest being a conscious and active goal. Pang offers one example in Charles Darwin’s afternoon walks of several miles, around his own back yard, after his morning labors. Now that I can do.
 
And I need to, to regenerate not so much to rejoin the too-tiny righteous army but to be able to remember how awful depletion and over-commitment feel. I need deliberate rest now because I am in fact joyless. For my many self-care rituals have proved inadequate against the number of heavy stressors I’ve faced recently. My habits of daily meditation, regular massage and reflexology, acupuncture, sufficient sleep, an 80% vegetarian-Mediterranean diet, investment in hobbies such as reading for pleasure simply haven’t been enough to sustain the physical and emotional power I believe define me.
 
So, I must rest. But first, I must learn how to rest.

Until next time,

By Nichole Guillory (WellAcademic Guest Blogger) - Mothering in Color

This past summer, I received an invitation from a leading scholar in my field to do a keynote address for a conference where other leading scholars showcase their work. He had asked before, and at that time, I said no. I said no, not because I didn’t want to do the keynote, but frankly, I didn’t even think I—or my body of work—was worthy of the ask.

Let me say that again. I did not even think I was worthy of the ask. Sad, right? Like too many other Black women in the academy subjected to consistent devaluation as scholars, I have struggled with/against Impostor Syndrome since I entered the academy as a professor more than twelve years ago.

I am the poster child for what psychologists identify as a condition of self-perceived intellectual phoniness. Doubting my accomplishments, thinking I am not deserving of my achievements, fearing exposure as an intellectual fraud—this is the internal script that has been on constant replay in my head. To this day, when people I meet for the first time ask me what I do for a living, I don’t say “professor.” I say I teach. The next question is invariably about where I teach, and when I tell them my university’s name, they tell me that I’m a professor. Did you catch that? Perfect strangers have to tell me that I’m a professor.

So when I received the invitation to do a keynote this time, my first reply was not just no, but hell no.  Doing a keynote with this group in particular, my closest colleagues in curriculum theory, engendered my worst fears about myself. I do not belong in this space. I am not a real theorist. I work in teacher education, not in a curriculum theory program. What someone else has to say is far more important than I what I have to offer.

I didn’t think that I could stand in front of large room full of scholars whose work I had read and studied. I felt like that they would see me just as I saw myself—an academic fraud, a phony, an impostor. I didn’t send the “regrets” email right away though. I told myself that I would sleep on the invitation and reply the following day.

Some of you reading this who are not Black women scholars may also feel like impostors in your workplaces too, but I just want to make clear that for marginalized groups, feeling like you are fraud and are not deserving of your achievements is often intensified by systemic racism, sexism, cis-genderism, and ableism, to name just a few. Systemic practices in the academy which value us for our service more than our scholarship, for our obedience more than our critiques, for our silence more than our voices are dehumanizing and do real damage to our productivity, not to mention our physical, emotional, and spiritual health and well-being.

So back to my decision about the keynote. I eventually said yes for one reason only. I am trying to teach my son to practice bravery when situations arise where he might be fearful. I don’t want him to allow fear to drive his decision-making like it did (does) mine for a lot of my life. I am not a perfect mother, but I am always an honest one, even when it’s hard. So I figured that I could not say no to the keynote and then turn around and tell him to say yes to doing things he fears. 

Mothering always pushes my boundaries. I’m not always grateful for the nudges, but this time proved differently.
The writing of the keynote—not delivering it in front of an audience—was the hardest part for me, mostly to calm the noisy voices of doubt and fear long enough to produce thoughtful and provocative analysis. I learned that I write best with an academic babysitter, which Roxanne reframes as writing “in community,” and without my writing partners—Roxanne and Megan—the voices would have won. The second hardest part was to quiet my comparison mind because conference organizers sandwiched my talk in between keynotes by two popular big name scholars whose work I admired from afar for all of my career. I told myself that they were the badasses, not me; that people would come to hear what they had to say, not me.

Having given the keynote last week, I now have the space to recognize that saying yes was one of the best decisions I made for myself (and ultimately for my son). Not because what I said was positively received, but because of the lessons I learned about myself and my work.

I am not an impostor after all. The academy has done its best to convince me that I’m not a scholar, but no more. It’s time we step back from the expectation of institutions that don’t value us in the first place and step up on behalf of ourselves.

My institution and all of its problems seem very small now in comparison to the work/writing I have left to do, and I realize that I must center my energy on intellectual work, which is my writing on Black mothering as a resistance practice, both as theory in my academic publications and as praxis in Mothering In Color.

People being moved by the keynote was a humbling experience that highlighted how grateful I am to all who paved a way for me to deliver the keynote in the first place. I was moved even more toward bravery by their very generous support of the work.

I invite others who are suffering through Impostor Syndrome to say yes to something you are fearful of doing. Taking that risk just might quiet those impostorism voices once and for all…or at least quiet them considerably.

Author

Nichole Guillory, PhD, is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Kennesaw State University. She publishes on the experiences of women of color in the academy. She is mom to Nicholas, the love of her life. We couldn't be happier that she has agreed to pen the Mothering in Color series for WellAcademic.