I am at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities this week in Toronto. It’s a massive conference, often 10,000 people. And it’s the first big such event I’ve attended since COVID… and since my electroconvulsive therapy.
Yesterday was the first day, and it was fun – I met up with dozens of old friends and met some new folks – but it was challenging. I found it hard to follow the philosophy talks because of a lack of focus/concentration, and hard to motivate excitement in the topics because of a lack of energy. I found myself not remembering people, which is new for me post-ETC. (A young woman, who had just done an excellent presentation, came up to say hello, telling me that I had taught her in a graduate seminar. It’s not just that I didn’t know her name; it’s that she might as well have been a stranger.)
Talk of post-ECT troubles brings me to a vicious cycle that I’ve been experiencing lately. It is showing up in my teaching too. I have difficulty with focus/concentration, energy and memory and these make me feel fear, and shame, that I can no longer do the job of a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. The fear/shame worsens my concentration and memory, and further saps my energy. And the cycle continues.
Here is what I have been telling myself in response, and what I kept saying to myself yesterday during the conference. There is hope that the troubles continue to improve over the years as I put the shock therapy further in the rear view mirror. This would reduce the performance anxiety by objectively doing better as time passes, by continuing to force myself to practice. (E.g., forcing myself to attend additional conferences.) That’s the one hand. The other hand is that I can simply demand less from myself, or different. Being a good professor is good enough while, meanwhile, I excel at other things. Even more drastically, maybe I can accept that I’ll hereafter perform badly by prior standards but that no one will die as a result. I would still be a good person.
Anyway, the conference continues until Thursday night. Today there is a panel that I helped to organize that is squarely in my research area. We’ll see how things shape up.