“That you are personally not bound by your institution’s metrics and expectations for tenure, for example, simply because you find them archaic? That you are not fully aware that tenure assessments are at the discretion of the tenured faculty and require no explanation at all? Or that in embarking upon an unsanctioned book project, you were taking obvious risks with both your publication record and your time? That you hold no responsibility for the quality or the critical reception of that book? That you in no way allowed your own conflicted feelings about what sort of book it ought to be clutter the clarity of the book’s argument? That you were perhaps not actually ready to write that book, which, unlike the scholarly articles you’d written, forced you to manufacture a more personal speaker, a ‘self’ in language, that would represent you, yourself, to the world? That you never managed to regain, in writing that book, the earnest confidence of the original article, from back when you thought your audience was only a few friends and you didn’t constantly second-guess your rhetorical ‘pose’? That for too long you’d held in your head many self-romanticizing notions about your position as an outsider, notions that allowed you to feel sure of yourself and important to yourself as long as you were never forced to share them—the notions—with anyone else? That as long as you didn’t share this side of yourself with anyone else, it was all unadulterated potential, never forced to perform, never exposed to judgment. That some glimmer of this ‘self’ had materialized long enough to write that article but this self was not really you, it didn’t sufficiently encompass what you care about or what you want to say. Because at the end of the day, you are uniquely ill-equipped to convey to the world what you care about or what you want to say. You know these things in your mind, or think you know them, and you are capable of saying these things or writing them, but the moment you do, you immediately doubt them. You are capable of being many selves but the moment you commit to one, it becomes an imposter, a dummy to dress up and roll out into the world in your place. And you hate the dummy, hate everything it says, even though it only says what you give it to say, and even though the words you give it to say are the best you can come up with. Which means, must mean, that the fault is not with the dummy but with you. That you are not as brilliant as you’ve always wanted to believe. As you’ve needed to believe. That it is easy to be impressed with yourself in private but another thing entirely to project a public self into the world—that this is a skill they don’t teach in school, yet so so so many people seem to have learned it. How did all these people, effortless at parties, easy on social media, how did they learn to be public? There must have been a moment, an afternoon in elementary school, when an imposing gray eminence showed up to class and passed out everyone’s public personas while you were in the bathroom. And here you are decades later still forced to pretend you’d been in class that day, that like everyone else you received your persona, that you’ve displayed it proudly on your wall ever since. Perhaps the real revelation today is not that these men seated before you wanted you to fail, even if that is obviously the case. Perhaps the real revelation is simply that life has caught up with you. All this time, when you thought you were fooling everyone, that was only because no one was paying attention. But eventually the world does pay attention, and suddenly it is you who are on trial, not the world but you. The trial you’d managed to put off for years is finally underway and you see, now, that you are not the plaintiff, as you’d always assumed, but the defendant, not the accuser but the accused. The person who puts herself out there is always the accused. How did this never occur to you? No doubt it occurred to a part of you, the part that kept putting it off. No doubt that’s why you postponed the trial as long as possible, preferring instead to live in a juvenile state of perpetual expectation, not because of the part that assumed you would someday be amazing, but because of the part that knew you would end up here, and what now? Now the box is open, reality spills out, and there’s no way to stuff it back in. Judgment has been meted out, the first sentence handed down, first of many because once this trial gets going there is no going back. The proceedings are irreversible, the stakes existential, the accusations keep piling up, the prosecution is relentless, the prosecution never rests, the defense never rests, nobody in this whole damn place ever rests, and if everyone else seems unfazed by this, the endlessness of everything, that isn’t because they live any less in the midst or on the spot or under the gun but because they manage it better than you do, or at least they are better at hiding it. You’re better at hiding than at hiding it, better at avoiding than bearing it, better at hoping it will all go away if you lie still eyes closed hands clenched hands clenched breathe—