I have recently befriended the humble button mushroom. I swore I never would, and I honestly thought mushrooms were the grossest things ever. The taste was meh, and the texture was unbearable and the idea of them being a fungus didn’t help. So after my whole life of diligently picking even the most minuscule mushroom boogers off pizzas and out of omelets, I have had a change a taste buds. Over the last year-ish, I have been making a conscious effort to learn to like the slimy little things, and we finally came to a truce when I cooked them myself for the first time. I grew out of it, and into something new.* (Shiitake mushroom and cabbage dumplings, to be specific!)
I thought I would do something clever here about mushrooms and growth and it would have been cute and the morel of the story would have been more than a pile of shiitakes. But I peeked at Laurel’s post and she articulated exactly what I was feeling much better than I would have–so I’ll cut to the chase. “Growth just keeps happening in the background. On rare occasions will I be able to actually see how far I have come. I guess now is not quite that time.” Sometimes I feel like I have grown so much, like learning to like mushrooms, or walking taller and finding my voice in writing and presenting, and then things like my thesis bring me back to reality, to feeling like I have no clue what in the world I’m doing.
At Festival of Scholars I had another one of those moments where I recognized how much I have grown. I have been working for about a full calendar year on this project, taking it from the idea phases of poking around interesting articles, to compiling “to read” lists that never seem to shrink. Much like Laurel, this was the first project I’ve ever done of this scale, and I don’t think anything could have prepared me for what it would actually be like to undertake a project like this until I did it. Most of this year I have felt like I have been thesis-ing wrong. I’ve felt myself falling into familiar patterns of procrastination, and saw everyone else making progress in the moments where I was most frustrated.
Maybe it is the sunshine we’ve had these few days, or maybe I’ve started doing something right, but at Festival of Scholars I felt a real shift. I had prepared a poster that was supposed to summarize what I have been rambling about for the last year, and it was hard because I hadn’t even been able to write it in long-form, much less the concise, well representative version. Ultimately, though, I was proud of it and it was really well received. And as I was pushed to talk about my research to people who had never heard it before, I realized things I hadn’t before. Something I know about myself that I am a really verbal/visual thinker, and sometimes my thoughts are not fully formed until I have said them out loud or used a really effective metaphor. So in saying it outloud, I managed to convince everyone else and myself that I was on to something here!
I did do research, and I did learn things and I can talk about them with some semblance of clarity! I have grown. From where I started (completely terrified) I found that I’m finally getting at something special. Now that I have managed the movie trailer version of what it’s about, there is still a huge load of work to do to make the feature length product anything worthwhile. But I will get there. And that is progress, and seeing that for myself has proven to me that I have grown, and that there is room to keep on growing.
*Okay mom, you were right.
**Title: So this post wasn’t about morels or morals but this pun was too well timed by Rebecca Kidder to pass up.