The exam
Jenny tried to tell herself that one day she'd laugh about this.
It was 2020. We all know what happened in 2020. Everyone stayed at home to avoid a virus.
Don't quibble. Sure, not everyone stayed home. There were some people who had jobs that required them to go out to work, and there were some people who thought it was all baloney and went out just to prove that they could. On the other hand it's not often that you can say that something happened over the entire world. It's not like saying, “everyone had long hair in 1968”, or “everyone was sick to death of the Tories in 2024”. You would have been hard pressed to find any hippies in 1968 Shanghai, and I doubt many citizens of Rio give a damn about the UK Conservative Party. But every single one of them had their lives knocked sideways in 2020.
This is the kind of take-a-step-back global context that Jenny wished she had, as she sat waiting to be let into a Zoom room.
She was not in the large and universally coveted office that she secured two years ago as one of the most successful research professors in her department. And the call was not with any of her students or postdocs or international collaborators, or with the head of a funding agency, or to give evidence to a government committee. It was with a therapist.
She was at home. She was in bed. She was wearing an old t-shirt, because she could no longer give a damn about maintaining a professional image.
What did she need to look professional for? She was about to talk to a therapist, for God's sake! Being a miserable shrunken wreck alone in her bed wearing an old unwashed t-shirt was the whole point of the call.
Well, no. The real point of the call was her recurring nightmare.
It was getting worse, and she was starting to believe it even when she was awake.
It was a standard student nightmare that she hadn’t experienced for years. Now it was back.
In the dream she discovered that she had to take an unexpected exam. The exam was in a course she had forgotten she was taking. She had not attended any of the classes for this course and now the exam was today and she was screwed.
Everyone has that dream. Right? You've had it. Haven't you?
Never mind — Jenny had been having it since she was an undergraduate. It was terrifying to wake up from back then, when it could have been real. While she was working on her PhD thesis, she could reassure herself, “You haven't sat an exam for years!” As a postdoc it was kind-of funny that she could still be afflicted by vestigial exam trauma.
Now it was not funny at all. Now she spent many of her waking hours obsessed by it. Several times she had searched online for potential courses she might be enrolled in. Needless to say, all she could find were courses that she was teaching. That was not reassuring. The only proper resolution would be to actually find her forgotten class, so that she could catch up on everything she had missed.
Hence the call with the therapist.
It had not been easy to arrange. When she called the university's helpline they first set her up with an expert on imposter syndrome. That had been one of those Zoom disasters.
“Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?”
The expert clearly could not hear her.
He was moving his mouth, so apparently she could not hear him, either.
“You must be muted,” she said, but of course he couldn't hear her.
“I'll type it in the chat,” she said, and wrote, “You must be muted. Can you hear me?”
He did not respond. Was he one of those novices who had not yet learned about the chat window? Or how to turn on his microphone? Or speaker?
“Maybe it's at my end,” she said, uselessly.
She went into her microphone settings and turned the gain up to maximum. “Can you hear me now?”
The expert yelped and leaped back in his chair.
“Ow, that was loud!”
“What the hell!? You could hear me all the time.”
“Yeah, I was just playing around.”
“What is wrong with you? You're supposed to fix imposter syndrome, and you start by trying to make me feel incompetent?”
He was immediately sheepish. “I'm sorry.”
Too sheepish, she felt.
“Do you have any formal training in this area?”
“Of course I do!”
“Show me your credentials.”
“Well, I don't have any actual credentials, but...”
“Great. So that's how you cure imposter syndrome? By showing me a real imposter? You better not get paid for this!”
After she hung up she had to admit that she did feel a little better. If only imposter syndrome had been the real problem.
Unfortunately the real problem was that she had not left her house for weeks, and all of her colleagues had been reduced to two-dimensional images who also lacked the will to get up in the morning.
The only exception was the colleague in Germany who looked on a Zoom call as happy and invigorated as ever. He also did not appear to be in Germany. Or, in fact, inside.
“I'm hiking through Brazilian rainforest.”
“How? The whole world is in lockdown!”
“It's the perfect time to travel. The airports are empty. The flights are empty.”
She was briefly overcome by a wave of moral disapproval, but she kept it to herself.
She explained that she was going mad. He said he knew how to get her an appointment with a real therapist. He couldn't talk for long — these satellite calls really drained his batteries, and he needed to get started on the day's hike if he wanted to catch his next flight, which now operated only once every two weeks — but told her he would check on her as often as possible. He promised that it would be much more frequently than she expected.
He did not call again.
However, she did eventually receive a Zoom appointment with a therapist.
While she waited for the appointment she tried to cheer herself up with reading. She had bittersweet memories of struggling with her thesis in graduate school and taking comfort from doggedly working through The Lord of the Rings. She was thankful for how often, and how increasingly often as she progressed through the books, that she encountered a piece of dialogue like this.
“We have lost all hope.”
“Then we must continue without hope.”
She would immediately slam the book shut and propel herself from the sofa or the bed or the bathtub, to her desk, and renew the attack on her thesis.
This time around she found the battered block of the single-edition paperback on her bookshelf and retreated in despair. It was too big! She scaled down to The Hobbit instead, but got stuck somewhere in the second chapter. Perhaps she should order a copy of Winnie-the-Puh?
That was days ago. Now she was in bed, surrounded by abandoned books and papers and food wrappers and dirty dishes and crumbs, and waiting for the therapist to join the Zoom room.
Finally a video window opened and a face appeared.
“Hi Jenny!”
It wasn't a therapist at all — it was her colleague in Germany who was not in Germany. He was outside again, and the location was familiar.
“I have good news and bad news.”
“What’s the good news?”
“I’ll start with the bad news. You won’t believe this. I checked your records, and as an undergraduate you really did enrol for a course that you never attended. You missed all the lectures and all the assignments and the final exam. It would have been the curse of doom on your transcript.”
Jenny felt a sickening lurching feeling, like her bedroom was about to be pitched out of the back of a huge cargo plane. “But… but it’s not on my transcript.”
“Some benevolent administrator must have realised what had happened, and removed it from your official transcript. You have to get access to the legacy records database to find it.”
“So in the end I really am an imposter intellectual?”
“Hardly. It was a computer science course.”
Jenny had no idea what to say. Her best attempt was, “What is the good news?”
“That’s the good news as well. Really it’s all good news. You’re not going crazy!”
“Um, Ok.”
“The other good news is: guess where I am?”
Jenny peered into the screen. As far as she could tell, she was still definitely going mad. “That looks like my street.”
“It is! I'm outside your house! Listen!”
Her doorbell rang.
“What are you doing here? What happened to the therapy?”
“I decided that this was the best therapy. Let's go travelling!”
“But... but... the virus! The lockdowns! The rules! It would be extremely irresponsible.”
“We will be travelling on empty trains and empty planes. We will be camping in empty fields and empty forests. There is nothing irresponsible about it.”
“What if everyone thought like that?”
“Then my argument would no longer hold.”
“But... but... we would be breaking the rules.”
“Is that your only excuse?”
Jenny suspected it was.
“Come on!” he said. “Are you a regular Hobbit who stays at home? Or are you the one-in-a-million who goes on an adventure?”
How did he know? It must have been luck. In the last page she read, Bilbo Baggins left his home and his biggest concern was that he forgot to take a handkerchief. The allure was irresistible.
To ensure that she did not set a bad example for her good neighbours, she waited until 2am, and crept out in cover of darkness into the streets that had been just as empty in the middle of the day, and began her adventure.
If you’re new here, welcome. For further guidance I refer you to the Table of Contents.