My last month has been great. I’ve been catching up on sleep, making myself good food and voraciously reading and watching shows and movies I missed during the semester. I’ve been journaling and making art. (Examples of both are actually at the bottom of the home page of this site! I can’t do much online but I rigged this to connect to my instagram page, RavynnCreates, which you should absolutely follow.) But I’ve also gotten some work done, too– I’ve already met with Jody about what my Lemon assistantship is going to look like next year and I’m killing it at my job at Michaels. (I’ve already gotten two really kind customer survey feedback reports, both of which are tacked on a board in our break room.)

I’ve even been having fun. I’ve always been mature and serious, so my idea of fun has always been very different than my peers’ ideas. But more recently I realized there’s point in always acting like I’m 40 when I have a solid twenty years before I get there and I have plenty of time after that to act like an old fuddy duddy. So I got a little more social. I stopped avoiding outings with friends and started taking people up on more lunch and dinner invitations. I’ve just been out and about more instead of retreating into my shell as I am so wont to do, going kayaking with buds or even just hanging out at coffee shops by myself. I’ve even *gasp* been to a concert!

Up until last Saturday, I’d never been to huge concert– unless you count going to BET Honors my fourth year of college, but that was definitely more show than concert– and I always assumed that my favorite artist would have to be headlining for me to go. (Read: I was pretty sure J. Cole was going to be my first and only concert.) But Chance the Rapper was in town, and I knew enough about him and his music to merit purchasing those spur of the moment lawn tickets. My friend and I hit the road to VA Beach, and I got to not only see the concert, but two of my dearest friends while we were there.

In between all of the various exciting outings, I have also been able to hang out with my parents and my uncles, who were up visiting from Key West last week.

And in between all of that?

I’ve been working on my Masters Thesis.

Even though I made a schedule for myself, starting seemed daunting. My first move was to get organized. I collected the two papers I wanted to use for my portfolio, collected my professors’ comments on those papers, any e-mail correspondence I’d had about the papers, and my SASA conference paper into one binder. I added a pad of paper to the back so if I had to take notes (which, clearly, I would) I could keep everything together.

So I had a nice heap of things I needed, strikingly organized in a clear binder with colorful dividers but that was about all I had.

I carried my project around in my purse with me for a few days so whenever I hit up a coffee shop (which was often), I could fish it out and look at it, as if staring at it would make clear what I was to do next.

For a while, I tried editing what I already had, slashing away at poorly worded paragraphs, circling ideas that were crucial but under developed, but it slowly became clear that though my Black Panther essay was the one that has been carrying me as a scholar, it’s also a mess.

I would have to rewrite it.

At first I was stuck in between a ton of emotions– frustration that there was nothing I could save, fear of starting from the bottom again, and a little disgust that I hadn’t written anything better. But I started to look at it as a good thing. The fact that I knew I had to try writing this paper again meant that my ideas had grown, my theory and source base had expanded and my execution has gotten better. Even just from semester one to semester two, my papers have gotten leaps and bounds better (though admittedly they still aren’t particularly well written.) I wanted my semester one ideas to be communicated with my semester two knowledge base.

It’s a good thing.

Then, after that panic subsided and I was able to move forward again, I started to worry that I would never be able to write in the tradition academic way. I wondered if I would ever be able to write clearly– create sentences, to quote Baldwin, that are “clean as a bone.” I remember reading a girl in my cohort’s paper at the end of the semester thinking, this is one of the clearest pieces I’ve read, this could be in a journal. She and I were both in the masters part of the program, but she could write like that and I still have trouble writing about only one idea at a time.

I began to worry that maybe I wasn’t “serious” enough of a scholar. I started to question the validity of my questions and my research interests. I started to question if I was doing something wrong. Clearly, comic studies and Black studies are vibrant fields, but I felt as if my work was missing components that made it relevant.

It didn’t help that I didn’t get the academic blogging internship I applied for.

Rationally: yes, I did submit my application late; no, I did not actually need to do the internship in addition to everything else I was doing this summer; and no, it really wasn’t that big of a deal.

Irrationally: I wondered why I wasn’t considered and instead of reasoning that a large part of it was my tardiness (which is probably was), I let the rejection be an indictment of my work. I blog, yes, but it isn’t “serious.” I do history, kind of. I do Black studies, in a way. I wasn’t doing work in a way that one particular group didn’t affirm as valuable. I wondered if I could be doing something better, what I could be doing better. I thought, maybe I should drop blogging all together and spend more time in the library, maybe I should try doing more archival research and then I’d be taken seriously, maybe I should stop trying to claim Black studies– is my work laughable?

I confided my worries to a fellow Black doctoral student in a different program and said to her, “Sometimes I really wonder if I’m even doing this right.”

She kind of smiled at me and said kindly, “I hear you and I hear your concerns, but I really doubt you’re doing this wrong.”

At the moment, I smiled and acted like I was reassured, but the truth was, I was still carrying around my project and not really doing anything with it. I was reading more articles and books, writing little summaries of them, just generally plodding along but not really moving forward.

This past week wasn’t much better. I spent a couple of days scouring the National Archive, hoping there might be something I could use for my paper so I didn’t have to go to Michigan to the archive my professor had suggested, mostly because I didn’t apply for summer research money. Finally, I returned to the Wakanda Syllabus, a tidy document of comic/Black studies resources, written by Dr. Walter Greason and posted on Black Perspectives, for new inspiration. A solid half of the material, I’d already come into contact with in some shape or form, but I made a point to click on every link.

One of the last sources linked me to an article in RVANews about a comic archive at VCU.

And it was like everything fell into place.

Another hour of researching uncovered that the archive had original issues of all of the comics I’d wanted to use, plus hundreds more that could almost certainly be relevant.

I took down as much information as I could, including the name of the archivist and her phone number, already getting excited that I had found something so relevant so close to home. This archive, at most an hour away from my apartment, might resolve a lot of the hiccups of self doubt and invalidity that I’d been feeling about my work.

(So definitely stay tuned because I’ll probably be writing about my first archive trip before long. Honestly, thank Rao that this archive is so close.)

I probably need to stop worrying so much and just let my mind take me where it wants to go. I wouldn’t be here if at least a few people didn’t think I had potential. I’ve got plenty of ideas– I just need to learn to stop doubting them. They’ve gotten me this far, I doubt they’ll fail me now.