I've come down to the empty drawer. Practically all my papers are clean, finished and published (or submitted). From now on, all my work is present, updated, based on my current life, not any sort of experience coming from behind. It is solidly planted in the fertile ground of the western academia.
Is that so? Yes, of course, many ideas, many unfulfilled aspirations come from behind. But the real question is to get rid of their negative balance, of that what they never managed to be. And if they never managed, how could they start to be now? This is the only mechanism how they kept me in the outskirts of what I call real academic life. This is why they were to be qualified as bad habits. The best part of all this experience is to see how I am growing, passing through stages. Perhaps I do enjoy the ride, this adventure of meeting and getting to know diverse academic contexts, just as Bulgaria and Roumania now. I feel tempted to go for a conference to Lithuania. I have never been in any of those Baltic countries. Perhaps because I feel I will still have time to enjoy Oxford, till the point of getting sick of it. I want to have this full scale academic experience. To understand the scale of real competence, of a real achievement. To fathom the difference between what is mediocrity and what is something more. It is a curious sensation -- to reach this recognition of the fact that I was mediocre myself. I used to see myself as someone exceptional since my childhood, and for sure it gave me strength to find myself where I am now. Otherwise I would never reach this point; I couldn't have been more humble than I was. Only now I can permit myself to see my own insufficiency, all those invisible links between myself, between what I agreed to interiorise, and my mediocre contexts. There is a moving frontier of my mediocrity. Now I feel that more or less everything I wrote before 2016 was in a way participating in that minor reality I have left behind. Only my writings from 2016 on are really decent, not shameful, representative of myself. That's what I feel. I had to do this enormous amount of more or less worthless work to be here where I am now. Nothing came to me cheaply. I'm ready to start seriously scratching items from my official list of publications, to condemn them to damnatio memoriae. Which, in the Polish context, I suppose, is very easy to obtain. In any case, no one ever reads these research publications we used to produce. The only profit of them is to make the ladder I need for my constant climbing higher and higher.
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