I printed the script for my dissertation proposal defense, revised it, and then reprinted it. I knew what I wanted to say about my research. I knew why I had chosen to interview clinicians and why I thought this study mattered. But when I joined the virtual meeting and began reading, my voice shook, my neck heated up, and I could feel myself sweating through my shirt.
I stumbled over a word and stopped to find the sentence again. I glanced at the screen and realized I needed to move to the next slide. Then I noticed I had skipped a section and tried, in real time, to decide whether I should go back. I could hear myself getting tangled up, but I kept returning to the pages.
I had worked so hard to get the words just right.
The project I was presenting is called the UNFOLD Model. It’s a proposed model for understanding experiences of faith deconstruction and reconstruction. For my dissertation, I’ll be asking clinicians who work with people navigating faith change what they make of it.
This project is deeply personal. I have lived through faith deconstruction, and I’m still in the process of reconstruction myself. There’s something vulnerable about bringing a project that grew out of your own life before a committee that can tell you to move forward or ask you to stop and revise. I had spent years trying to put language to parts of that experience, and now I was sitting in front of my committee, struggling to read the language I had prepared.
When I finished presenting, they began asking questions. They wanted to know why I had made certain choices and how I planned to carry out the research. I listened and answered. Without the script to follow, I could talk about the study I had spent so much time thinking through.
Then they asked me to leave the virtual meeting while they talked. I had ten minutes to take some deep breaths and wonder what they would say when I came back.
When they brought me back, they congratulated me. I had passed my proposal defense. I was shocked. Elated. A bit in disbelief. Relieved. I had been working toward that moment for so long, and for a minute I could hardly take it in.
Then they gave me their feedback.
“Lose the script,” my chair said.
They knew I was nervous, but they had seen me present before. They knew I understood my research, and they could hear it when I answered their questions. Reading had tripped me up.
“You are the expert in this. We know you know this,” one of my readers said.
I believed that they meant it. What caught me off guard was how hard it was to believe it about myself.
I’m not sure when I began to doubt my own thinking. I grew up hearing that women were supposed to submit to men. At the time, that was just part of how the world was explained to me. As I got older and began studying and working in ministry, I saw how those beliefs shaped what I could do. In one church, I could preach if a man stood on the stage with me. In another, I couldn’t be on the stage at all. I had spent years preparing for ministry, but whether I could speak still depended on the rules of the church I was in.
As I was finishing seminary, I asked the priest at our church about ordination. He told me to call the diocese, so I did.
The person I spoke with told me it was unusual for me to call on my own behalf. My priest needed to put my name forward to a discernment committee. That committee would meet with me for six to twelve months and help explore whether ordination was the right path for me.
I wasn’t asking him to decide that I should be ordained. I wanted the chance to enter the process and ask the question with people who were there to help discern it.
He would not put my name forward.
I don’t know why he told me to make the call. I know I followed his direction, only to learn that I couldn’t even bring the question before the committee unless he put my name forward.
I thought about that experience after my proposal defense. I had prepared for questions about my methods, and my committee had asked them. What I hadn’t prepared for was how it would feel to hear them say they trusted my thinking, especially when this work had begun with questions I had once struggled to ask aloud.
Maybe that’s part of why I held so tightly to the script. I had written every word down because I wanted to present the work carefully and do it justice. When I stumbled, I kept looking to the pages to find the right way to speak about something I already knew by heart.
I don’t think one conversation repairs years of learning to doubt yourself. I passed my proposal defense, and I am so happy and relieved about it.
I left thinking about the difference between the people and organizations who taught me to question whether I could trust my voice and the people who heard it, even through my nerves, and encouraged me to use it.
I’m still learning what it feels like to believe them.