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This past semester has come and gone with a speed that has developed into its own cliché. We can’t believe it, how did all that work get done, it’s all such a blur, et cetera, et cetera. The many-hued pronouncement is closely followed by a sigh of relief, a lifting of the shoulders, and a blissfully blank mind, punctuated only by the sacred student mantra: “It’s over, it’s over, it’s over.” We step out of the Fieldhouse, bracing ourselves against the doorway draft, and, for the next twenty-or-so steps, the world (which, at this point, doesn’t extend far beyond the campus and the nearest wine and beer dispensary) seems completely and perfectly peaceful. There are no dues to be paid. There is no one who needs to be pleased. The future is there, but it isn’t urgent enough to be reckoned with. Everything is suspended.

For some of us, though, the momentary peace begins to crumble somewhere around the twenty-first step out of the final-exam room. A daddy-long-legged panic creeps its way along the spine and settles in the brain, spinning an obsessive web of “You-could-have-done-mores” and “You-really-have-no-idea-what-you’re-doings.” The sacred student mantra takes on a radically different connotation (“It’s over, it’s over, you’ve been found out, it’s all over for you”), and the celebratory drink that we’ve been looking forward to for two weeks becomes a pathetic tool for subduing those ceaseless, seemingly disembodied accusations.

If you’re thinking, “Wow, that’s a bit over-the-top. . .” you would be right. It is completely exaggerated and irrational and self-flagellating. That tends to be the nature of self-sabotage. And this past semester has been particularly bountiful with it: a symptom, I believe, of that very specific illness known as Acute Senioritis. The one that hits fourth-years as soon as they realize they are fourth-years, and that essentially amounts to taking on a terrifying Janus-eyed vision of the past and the future while attempting to remain rooted in the present. There’s no time for frivolous carpe diem-ing (is that even a ‘thing’ anymore?). In fact, “seizing the day” now seems like the kind of bad advice that that uncle we see once a year at Christmas gives with a free-flowing generosity that only gets more free-flowing as the night and the alcohol wear away. Every little thing, every inconsequential decision, every hour not spent studying or writing that paper hangs like an academic albatross around our necks, and we start wondering when we got it into our heads that we could, indeed, “do this.” (Probably from those multi-coloured ‘inspirational guidance’ posters that hung in every single one of our grade-school classrooms, and that started to seem insulting to our intelligence around grade six. . . ‘Shoot for the stars’? Really? Is that the best piece of advice you have?’).

If I were to pinpoint the time and place where I contracted this illness, I would say around the first week of September, before classes had officially started. On the cusp of a full-blown panic, I approached one of my professors and all but begged her to explain, please, explain what a girl has got to do to prepare a winning statement of intent for grad school and scholarship applications. I just wanted it laid out for me in intricate detail, point-by-point, no cut corners or vague truisms, but a foolproof formula. (My mother tells me to this day that I was not among those schoolchildren who dealt well with ambiguities. To which I say. . .yes, that sounds about accurate.)

“Well,” this professor said, crossing her legs and placing her hands in her lap in the universal sign of ‘this-is-not-going-to-be-the-answer-you-expected’, “the first thing you have to understand is that these statements could be seen as exercises in deception: tests of your ability to do with confidence something that you don’t yet feel confident doing. Do you understand?”

No. No, I did not. Of course, “Yeah, I think so. . .” was my verbal translation. That’s another thing I’ve never been good at: admitting when I feel like something has gone over my head.

Sensing my unspoken need for clarification, she continued: “If you want to be a competitive applicant, you have to show your readiness to jump into a game that is already being played and show the players that you, too, know how to play. There is an element of pretending here: you need to show that you are in control of a scholarly voice that you probably feel is not quite yours yet.”

At the time, her words seemed to border on the downright blasphemous. Not quite catching her point, I asked myself, Pretend? As in, act like I have a clue when I really don’t? As in, bald-facedly lie to a bunch of academics? Or, if not lie, at least paint a much more illustrious picture of myself than is technically accurate? Isn’t that some kind of subspecies of plagiarism?

It was only when I got home and sat at my desk in front of a blank Word document, armed with the debris of numerous half-travelled lines of inquiry, that I began to understand just how many facets of ‘deception’ could be employed in my situation. The operative form, however, had less to do with deceiving scholarship adjudicators or graduate administrators, and more to do with deceiving myself. Indeed, it took an astoundingly short period of time for my emotional pendulum to swing from “You can’t be better prepared than you are now” to “You are screwed,” and I began to fall back on all-too-familiar patterns of thought: “You really aren’t anything special, and neither is your project. Why are you even bothering with all of this, anyways? What do you think you’re going to achieve? Who the hell do you think you are?” This voice has the benefit of concentrating all of its energy on one relentlessly repetitive theme, and so never suffers a lack of energy.

In retrospect, over the three-or-so months that it took to construct my statement of research interest, I estimate that I came within a hair’s breadth of giving up on at least four separate occasions. There were mornings when I woke up and my cost-benefit analysis suggested to me that none of it was worth all of this hair-pulling and late-night existential crisis-having. But, after a couple of frantic-turned-calming chats with my mother (bless her heart!), I thought about the December 1st deadline coming and going without my filing a submission, and I knew that my cost-benefit analysis needed to be revisited. (Friendly tip: never trust the results of such analyses when you’re feeling emotionally unstable.)

That being said, it was never going to be sufficient enough for me believe the unadorned truth, which, in my case, was that I’d worked hard but that there were many other people who had also worked hard and who deserved a SSHRC grant just as much, if not more, than I did. That kind of level-headed reasoning couldn’t compete against the heavily fortified wall of self-doubt that had been building upwards at a steady pace since the first day of kindergarten, when I sobbed with anxiety over my illiterateness. (I wish that were a joke, but I was unusually precocious when it came to doubting my capacity to achieve even the most basic of human skills.) So I had to take it just a step beyond the factual and fight exaggeration with exaggeration: I was the best candidate in the running, I did have the most interesting project, and I could expect the result that I wanted.

The process itself was still exhausting, and I still threw my hands up in the air—with way more dramatic flair than was necessary—when I hit moments of writer’s block. I even had an embarrassing cry in front of a professor when I realized, on November 28^th, that my submission was two pages over a limit that I had not previously known existed. (Friendly tip # 2: Government documents are painfully inefficient and difficult to read, but, for your own sake, read every last word three times over). In the end, though, deceiving myself into believing a slightly more self-serving version of the truth is what allowed me to carry on and finish what I’d started: which is, in fact, the beginning of a new phase that my entire undergraduate career has been leading up to.

There is a small part of me, I think, that will always believe that I am a fraud, or a failure, or just some garden-variety screw-up. In an indie comedy, this characteristic would be the quirk that makes me seem neurotically lovable and delightfully off-kilter to the cute and discerning—and probably ukelele-playing—hero. (And, in an ideal world, the movie would be interesting enough for Greta Gerwig[1] to sign on to play me). But we are not in an indie comedy, and I would gladly exchange this ‘quirkiness’ for just about any other character flaw. Because there are some days when persevering and ‘learning something about myself’ seem like one bad joke made up by the same companies that printed those gaudy inspirational posters scotch-taped to our grade-school classroom walls.

I figure, though, that if this is my so-called ‘lot’ in life, I could do worse than having the audacity to combat my exaggerated flaws with an exaggerated sense of my virtues. As one professor has told me (the same one who inspired this prolonged examination of the nature of ‘deception’), “You cannot wait to start doing things until you stop feeling insecure, because that is never going to happen. The very best you can do is take a deep breath and start anyways.”

I’m not saying that self-deception is, on balance, a good thing. I’m not saying that there aren’t going to be times (many, many times) when taking a step back and saying “Wow, I really sucked at that” is necessary—even healthy. But I have come to believe that, just as there are times when deception convinces us that our mistakes are worse than they actually are, there are times when positive self-illusions are integral to getting the job done, to simply making it through the day.

So, maybe I will get that scholarship. Maybe I will have all my graduate-education fees paid for, with enough left over to live on. And maybe I won’t: the doubt is certainly there, and, realistically, it is far more likely that I will be rejected by SSHRC than accepted. (And by ‘I’, I mean my proposal, but, like any good over-achiever, I make little distinction between my self worth and my academic output). At this point, though, when all control has been resigned to an anonymous panel, and the holiday season is brimming with a practically prescribed optimism, it can’t hurt to hold out an audacious hope.

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[1] If you ever want to see a painfully brilliant (with emphasis on the painful) depiction of post-graduation anxiety, watch Frances Ha. You will laugh, you will cry. . .and then you will cry some more. But you might laugh some more, too, so. . .it’s your risk to take, really. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.