I think about my project and get overwhelmed almost immediately.

*reads my prospectus again*

I also think about the current state of the academy and whether it will recover and what does that mean for my project: should I take my project to a different medium? do I even have a project? who cares about these questions? should they?

the ideas excite me. what I need to do to execute them properly is what frightens me. finding anyone to care about whether or not I’m capable of even answering these questions, getting someone to be invested in seeing my project materialize is becoming increasingly difficult.

and then I hear Saidiya Hartman in my head during her interview with Arthur Jafa about how everyone thinks she’s always been the departmental darling, the discipline’s primaballerina; how no one took her, her work seriously. how you have to take yourself, your work seriously.

then I’m like “but nigga you’re no one’s Saidiya Hartman.” and then I get into the questions of if my ideas are mine at all; are these speculations original, helpful, interventional, and to what extent can they matter to anyone?

I wonder about job security.

I wonder what can I actually teach? who actually wants to know what I think about blackness and deviant sexuality and expressive cultures? how do I get the cinema studies people to take me serious? can AfAm take theory serious? is the historian all I should be!
lol @ job security

does theory matter? how do I sell myself as something other than a theorist—wannabe philosopher? how do I sell myself on a market that won’t exist? how do I sell myself? why do I sell myself? for a project no one actually wants?
I think about what afropessimism needs.
fin.