After 11 straight rejections I think I am done. I have been submitting papers to peer-reviewed journals since May 2009 and until today nothing has worked out. My tenure is now in serious danger. The point is that I do not want to fool myself any further,the brutal truth is that I am just not good enough. It is normal to find excuses, to complain about the peer-review system, but probably it is just me.

The reviewers do not know who I am and they are expects; if my papers were truly good some should have been accepted for publication. The reality is that 11 different people, who are professionals, believe that I am not good enough, why should they be wrong? I think it is that more plausible that I am wrong.

I am starting to think that my past has been a lie. The admission to a very prestigious PhD program, the positive remarks of my PhD examiners.I think that I have been probably very lucky until now. Probably I simply met nice people who wrongly believed that I was good, while in fact I am not.

My school career proves my point. I have been a very strange student. Some teachers thought I was very good, some that I was very bad. I experienced getting the highest and the lowest grades. My results had nothing to do with my effort, I has always been very studious. In the past I believed that the teachers who did not value me were fool, maybe I was the fool.

There was a time in which I thought that the system was unfair; I questioned the validity of peer-reviews and of the tenure-track system. Now I am ready to be honest: I was deluding myself. The tenure-track system is just there to make sure that people who seem to be good but cannot deliver, like myself, are kicked out.

I have no alibi. My institution gave me enough time to work on my research. It is true that in my institution I have no one to share my work with, but it is also true that at this stage of my career I should be able to take care of myself.

There is something very very sad about all of this. I am a very hard-working and honest person. I work as hard as I can and put all of myself into what I do. Nonetheless, it is not enough. Getting published is not about how hard you work, it is about how clever and original you are.

I still have 2 years before I am up for tenure and to be honest what scares me the most is my determination and persistence. I know that I am a very strong willed person, but here is the problem: is persistence always a virtue? What if we delude ourselves that we can do something when we just cannot? We can try all our life to walk through a wall, but we will never succeed. I think that may be persistence is sometimes a form of dishonesty. In my case, I feel that I cannot accept being a mediocre scholar and will keep trying to prove others wrong. In the process I will kill myself with work, worries, and anger and then…I may still fail. I am sure you read stories about people who failed countless times but succeeded in the end. But what if it is also true that some people destroy themselves in trying and nothing is achieved. I read many times that failure is the key to success. Is that true? I know very brilliant people in my field who very rarely fail. I know stories of great athletes who knew only victories. Why should struggle be part of success?

My struggle now is to reach the point is which I am truly totally honest. I am not looking to a strategic way to consider my situation, I only want the truth. A part of me still hopes that may be I am good enough. This part scares me; I feel this part is the voice of my delusion and dishonesty. I feel that this voice is the voice of arrogance, the arrogance of a person who refuses to see his limitation and to say: I am not good.

I haven’t quit yet because I am unsure of what kinds of jobs I might be eligible for. I want to stay in the university setting, and I would be very interested in doing administrative work. Yet, when I tell friends and colleagues of my potential plan, they scoff and say that I would not even be eligible for that, given that I haven’t completed secretarial school. I’ve applied for over 20 faculty positions and over 20 administrative positions, and have scored ZERO interviews of any kind. This is all very frustrating and thus I continue to plug away at postdoctoral research that makes me miserable.

I am looking at Plan A and Plan B and who knows what else. One is #alt-ac and the other is wwaaayyy out in left field.

Having a support system in place is, I’m learning, totally necessary. I’m working on affording a life coach; I have had informational interviews with people in #alt-ac in the cities near my new location; and I offered to be the resume and cover letter guinea pig for a friend looking to start up an #alt-ac consulting business. Julie’s blog and newsletters are great reminders and boosts when my energy for all this “new” flags and giving up seems logical.

As with “thedustbiter” above, I have started a blog to sort through my process of job hunting, or exploring what comes next. I didn’t have a toxic department to flee, and boy do I miss the collegiality!

I have a book coming out soon that has an entire chapter to help readers untangle the question — am I afraid because I don’t think I CAN do it… or is it that I don’t really want “it” — the job, the promotion, the career, growing a small business into an empire…

Thanks for shedding light on the fact that success is complicated.

Valerie Young
ImpostorSyndrome.com