For me, one of the most memorable parts of the first-year paper that all students in my program have to write was a footnote that appeared on page two of my final draft. My paper was on Jinan’s history during the 1850s and 1860s, specifically the organization of defenses against invasions by different rebel groups. Like the dissertation chapter it became, the paper wrestled with how to relate Jinan’s particular and under-appreciated experiences to sweeping developments that shaped modern China.

The topic of this footnote was severe flooding on the Yellow River in 1855 that led to its course shifting northward, where it usurped the bed of a river that had long run only a few miles north of Jinan. Jinan’s history thus intersected with an ecological catastrophe of staggering proportions, whose ramifications were still unfolding decades afterwards. Any student of Chinese history is at least vaguely aware of this event, and a significant portion of my adviser’s first book examines its long-term effects and the state’s response to it in the region upriver from Jinan. So there really was no slipping this past him.

The problem, as I had discovered, was that while my paper was a story about the 1850s and 1860s, the history of the Yellow River’s effects on Jinan could only be written on a longer time scale, since recurrent flooding and, consequently, intensive flood prevention efforts in the city’s vicinity did not really begin until the 1880s. Tackling this topic would have blown up the paper I was writing. I seriously doubt I could have written such a paper, and, even if I had, it would have been awful. So I wrote a footnote—a promissory note, really— explaining the situation and suggesting that this topic would be best explored in greater depth in a later paper.

Now that promissory note has come due.

Chapter 4 of the dissertation—the last one I am drafting—examines the ecological, humanitarian, and commercial effects of the Yellow River’s change in course on Jinan in the decades after 1855. Needless to say, I was right to leave it to a separate chapter, and even then it barely fits. True, it may have been a mistake to leave it for so long. It’s right in the middle of the dissertation and so writing it has forced me to tie things together in a way that would have been helpful to have done well before now. Maybe if I had worked on this particular topic sooner, I would have been able to pitch my project more in terms of environmental history than the messy intersection of social, political, and cultural history I’ve staked out for myself. And maybe I wouldn’t, once again, find myself as squeezed for time, having to put off digging deeper into interesting questions for later on.

Early in grad school, I envied where I was going with the dissertation since I imagined I would have time to fill out the holes I was grasping towards in insecure footnotes I wrote to my adviser. Now, I envy where I was, since those unfinished early footnotes suddenly appear much fewer than the paths not taken in a project that is supposed to be finished. There are days when I step back and am amazed at how much I’ve been able to piece together over these several years. Mostly, though, I find myself writing mental footnotes about things I feel stupid for not knowing, inadequate for not having the time to figure out.

In the past, I’ve coped with these feelings by telling myself that research and writing are iterative. As individual scholars and a community of academics we never nail down everything all at once. It takes working together over quite a long time to reach an understanding about big problems. I still very much believe that, and in theory that could be part of my own professional trajectory. Revising the dissertation for publication as a book, spinning out related journal articles, and beginning a second project could give me the chance to delve into some of these hanging footnotes. Not knowing if I’ll be employed in a capacity to do this work myself or if my work will be able to draw others to these questions (which is much less likely for an unpublished dissertation than a published book) makes it harder to sell myself on iteration as a habit of academic life.

There is a lot to be done about the growing precarity of academic life, especially by administrators at well-funded institutions who profit from it. While we challenge the structural precarity of academia, though, we also need to find a way to live in it as best we can, to be compassionate toward others and ourselves. Footnotes are a small, mundane, but indispensable part of that. Footnotes reflect consideration for the reader because they aid in independently evaluating the conclusions a writer reaches. They also invite readers to pursue further investigation of their own. But writing footnotes can also be an act of compassion towards ourselves as writers, a friendly reminder that we didn’t start with all the answers and won’t end with all of them either. And that’s true whether you’ve written a hundred articles, twenty books, or only a single dissertation.