Name! That! Fear!

In the comments to the previous post, N. Pepperell and I have been sharing the irrational fears swirling around our respective dissertations.  Mine:

I needed some piece of evidence to prove to the literalists—including the one who keeps me tossing and turning night after night, whispering endlessly about how I'm making all this up—that, well, that I'm not making this all up.

Pepperell's:

My recurrent problem is that, after the initial excitement of finally piecing something together, I tend to become really paranoid that I've just "discovered" something that everyone already knows, but no one is writing about, because they think it's all terribly obvious and only a very dull person wouldn't see it immediately.

Both fears are so constituitive of graduate student life as to deserve proper names.  Only I don't feel so clever tonight.  (Seven hours of student conferences do dull a mind good.)  I'd appreciate you christening them something clever.  Don't worry about taking responsibility for the credit.  I have it covered. 

Also, this list is far from exhaustive.  Feel free to profess other common fears irrational in nature and paralyzing in effect.  I aim to be the graduate student source for all that bumpifies in the diurnal transverse occupying the sequential yet interstitial moments after becoming-soporific but before Corvus americanus' crowification shatters the stillness of our shared, slumbering dawn.

Comments

[Miriam]

Trust me: those fears never, ever go away. Not even after you're tenured.

[Laura]

I believe the first one is the imposter syndrome, the fear that you're just spouting words but underneath, there's nothing real. You're pretending you know what you're talking about. Also common in the tech field. Particularly annoying when someone is a real imposter and doesn't harbor any fear about it.

I'm not sure what to call the second. Fear of the obvious?

What we need here is some good Latin. Unfortunately, I barely passed my Latin exams.

[comandante agi]

UCI, eh? I'll be joining the School of Humanities this fall getting an M.A. in history.

Thanks for linking to the defeatists by the way.

[Natalia]

What about the fear that your research is, unbeknownst to you stunningly incomplete, and that you're missing huge sources that, to everyone else, are obviously relevant, but that you've never even heard of? The fear that the MLA International Bibliography is keeping things from you?

[eb]

On fear, I recommend Caleb's post from a while back. (Full disclosure, the comment there signed by "aj" is mine. Sometimes I think I should have stuck with those initials, but that's an entirely different story.)

I fear that I'll get a major argument right but make errors with minor details, bleeding my work dry with a thousand cuts.