Thread by @empathywarrior

I wonder for how many other scholars who have taken time away from their research (or from whom research time has been taken away) there is a significant forgetting of what you know. I can't name a lot of what I read anymore. I feel, often, like I would be embarrassed to teach.

In the five years since I finished my PhD, I have not done research for many reasons. First, because I was unemployed and too worried about money - for a while my only income was poorly-paid marking at a local college - to even think or write or read.

And then, I had a non-academic job, and I commuted three hours round-trip each day for it. At one point, I worked four days a week at that job and then commuted out to UBC to write sometimes, since I still knew grad students in the department.

And then I got a postdoc, and was hesitant to give up what could have been a stable non-academic job, so I tried to do a postdoc and work 20 hours a week, and was so exhausted that after 7 months I left my job to focus on the postdoc.

And then I tried to work and I remember reading and writing, but not really what I was working on in the summer of 2018. In September of that year, I moved to Hamilton, Ontario. Two months into that second year of my postdoc, I sustained a brain injury.

I moved three large boxes of books to Ontario and read none of them. I wrote a little, read some. I wrote a book proposal. I made a zine. I applied for a job, I interviewed for a job, I wrote sample syllabi for that, I know I did all that.

And yet, I don't know if the pandemic just accelerated things, but I can't honestly talk about my research anymore. I can't give you quick synopses of the major arguments of books I read over and over and over again for years. I worry that I've just lost it, for good.

It's really, really hard to say that. Because if nothing else I feel just embarrassed, to feel like I have to start over. And that's okay in some ways, because I know how I want to revisit the things I used to work on, but I wouldn't dare apply for a job because I can't...do it.

Or at least, that's how my brain feels. Like I have this gap, where all the things I was so immersed in feel so foggy. And I would feel quite frankly embarrassed if someone asked me to like, summarize certain works by Foucault or like...anything. It's like I've lost it all.

I don't know if this is what happens when you don't get the opportunity to be an academic for a while because employment dictates otherwise, or when you've got a chronic illness, or a brain injury, or if this is what pandemics do to our brains.

I don't know, because I honestly don't know. Is it just that I need more years of sustained, daily and weekly engagement with the research and the texts? Like does it just stick after 20 years? Or is it because I've been thinking in isolation for so long? Or am I just broken?

It's like trying to grasp smoke sometimes. That's all I can describe it as, and this was before the pandemic. These wonderful moments of clarity about things, and then a huge wave of doubt about what I know and don't know.

I'm picking up two book projects again after a very long time, two books I desperately want to write, two books I've been imagining writing for years, two books for which I do at least have a sense of what more I need to read to make the analyses work, and yet...and yet.

I can only describe it as having an internal sense or deep feeling about my work sometimes, when I'm reading, or when I'm listening to talks, like an intellectual impulse that has a shape and a colour and a direction but at the level of language sometimes just...fails me?

I don't know. I just think maybe we don't talk about this much, or enough, or at all. That no matter the reason you've been away from the work for a long time, maybe it's just hard, maybe you feel so foolish and so useless and ashamed even. My face is flushing right now.

I lived all of this. I lived with these texts and these arguments and these fields for years. It's not that I think we all have encyclopedic knowledges, but...surely to be able to hold on to more of it?

In my more optimistic moments, I do think about how knowledges hold me as much as I claim to hold them. I think about how the texts are still there. I wonder, sometimes, if what I need is just a more robust way of touching the texts. Am I in want of careful notes and indexes?

And as I come to different knowledge formations post-Phd, post-postdoc, as my work - at least, the idea of my work, if not its practice - is informed so deeply by Black scholars and artists and world-shapers, I think, well, it can't be a complete loss, can it?

Is this feeling of loss, of the illusion of some kind of comprehensiveness, a way of leaning deliberately into smaller, more careful work? Like being intimately acquainted with a single author's works, a single book, a single sentence. I have no answers.

If nothing else, I am accustomed to theorizing the absent, the lost. I studied (and still study?) the intersections of violence and speech and representation. I studied silence, and it's both funny and awful to feel like I can't...say anything about it? Anymore? Right now?

Or is this just what reading is about? I don't even know anymore. I don't know how much we're supposed to remember about what we've read and how much of life is just endlessly looking at notes to remind us, and re-reading, and re-reading, and re-reading, and re-reading...

I would just very much like some of it back, whatever it was I used to have, the thing I'm struggling even now to describe, but whose loss - or at least whose palpable change - I feel very deeply, viscerally.

What I do know is that the feelings aren't absent. I recall the way certain lines of thought and texts made me feel, however abstractly, because I think those feelings or impressions are animate how I listen and how I ask questions now (I do more listening than question-asking).

Feelings or impressions including but not limited to: befuddlement, clarity, sharpening, expansiveness, frustration, refusal. And of course I know by name many, many of the texts in relation to which I had those feelings or impressions, but it's the details that escape me.

Sometimes, it's comforting to think of texts or ideas escaping me. Maybe what I'm trying to formulate here (as an act of hope?) is a way that my experience could not just be one of loss but of a positioning that resists mastery, even if it's not necessarily deliberate on my part.

The way that I feel called to return to texts, the way that I want and have to re-visit texts, even as I struggle to process complexity again. How it takes longer to parse out the arguments, but maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe I should be taking my time anyway.

And I'm not teaching, but reading anew with students could be a good pedagogical move. A methodology informed by forgetting things, or admitting that we don't always recall the details could be both intellectually generative and generous.

I think about this, too, in the long shadow that we call "post-COVID," both in terms of those who experience the sequelae of having had the virus, but also in terms of the slow movement (a "slouching towards," maybe, to cite Joan Didion) towards not having an active pandemic.

I wonder how if in order to make space in our brains for death and uncertainty if it's the instructions or the equations or the texts that get jettisoned: for a time, or forever. Who is remembering anything they're teaching or learning. And how to remember. And why. What for.

It's slouching onwards towards a late hour, though. I feel whatever clarity I had through writing this thread start to be fuzzy with sleepiness, not that I had any kind of purpose of "argument" here, moreso just a thinking through and a worrying aloud (selfishly, mostly.)