Sense of a foreshortened future

Clinical terms for "impending doom"

I am scared to write.

Writing used to be about connection — a way for me to work myself out of isolation and to you, in one form or another. It meant a lot to have your ears or eyes, from time to time.

But these days, I can’t manage to write anything critical or coherent enough to publish — paywall or not. I’m suffering, if I’m honest.

I blame this lapse in productivity on being acutely traumatized, at first. I delete calls for proposals and conference abstracts. Time marches. Wires got crossed somewhere along the way. Trauma has a way of making the pleasurable frightening and the future feel horribly “foreshortened” — sucks to expect things to suck. I didn’t plan on becoming a critical theorist. I send a friend a text: “Let me know if you wanna hang out. I am on the verge of death, and trying to write myself into life.”

Death. Specifically, I am growing quite sure that writing theory is going to get me killed. Death being the opposite of connection, I find myself at an impasse when the cursor flashes and demands rudely that I walk the plank. Read. Write. Be read (wrong, obviously). When I share this worry with my friend, she is good to remind me that the capstone experience of our PhDs involved an ideologically-motivated hate crime in a gender studies class on our campus where Covid-19 restrictions had recently eased, allowing for a return to in-person learning. I probably should have been scared way sooner.

“Jokes circulate about how we might as well just wire ourselves directly to sensation buttons and skip the step of content altogether” (Stewart, 2007, p. 69).