broken record

In trying to find a name for my blog, I googled "obscure words" and came across "epicrisis" which roughly means praising or disparaging a perspective by quoting someone else.* Yup. That's pretty much what I do.

A very dear friend, who I owe a long email to, said she hears my voice when I write. Funny, I've often felt as though I have no voice. In fact, the reason I chose the grad schools that I chose was because the Sociology they condone allow for such things. Yet, I am not sure how to do that quite yet. Or I think I don't know how to have a voice. Part of it is that I come from an applied sociology background. But the other reason is that I don't quite trust what I see yet. I am not sure I have an analysis or at least one worth putting on paper.

Some of my dear friends and colleagues assure me that this is not the case and I appreciate their encouragement. But I can't seem to get over that little voice in my head that says "fraud fraud fraud fraud." So, I rely on other peoples' analyses to demonstrate my points. But I'm not sure, in the academic sense, when this becomes cherry picking. I know it does, in fact. In a paper that I wrote, I was accused of setting up a "straw dog" defined as "something (an idea, or plan, usually) set up to be knocked down. It's the dangerous philosophy of presenting one mediocre idea, so that the listener will make the choice of the better idea which follows" (my emphasis). That feedback was pretty much right on and pretty much my fear - always.

I think it's important to be rigorous and diligent with research and writing and I need to learn how to toughen up if I am going to do what I do. But I worry that I am getting myself into a whole mess of trouble in choosing the field that I did. I am not sure I really understand what's going on around me and my learning curve is pretty steep at times. Many of the activists that I am surrounded by (for the organizing that's going on in Toronto around the summit) are writing papers just like I am. Yet they seem to breeze through it. They somehow produce papers in the middle of the organizing as though that part of their life is incidental and as time consuming as that annoying pimple they are going to get around to squeezing. Here I am - I fret fret fret about my writing, sitting in front of my computer writing and deleting mediocre sentences for hours on end. I feel like I can't seem to pull it off somehow. It's enough to make a gal crazy. If only I could eliminate the voice telling me to shut up long enough to do the work. And then I could get around to doing the other work too.

*It's also a medical term meaning secondary crisis in the course of a disease.