Some things I learned:
1. Never volunteer to present at a conference you haven't attended.
2. It's a terrible thing to make people who are presenting and are already nervous drive miles and miles up a winding mountain road with no guard rails or anything on the side that goes off down the mountain.
3. Historians and archivists are REALLY different. I probably should have known this, and theoretically, I did, but wow. They really are different.
4. I never want to be an academic. Although, I already knew this. Academic conferences are not like professional conferences.
But, the presentation did go well. I got there and saw the room, which was not an auditorium or stage*, and there were people in the audience who were as old as my grandma and how can you be scared of your grandma? So that calmed me down a lot. I managed to keep the 'um's to a minimum, which was good, because when practicing I kept stumbling over my words. And the chairman at the end of the session made me sound really really smart. (Modernism didn't cross my mind once, because, yeah, not a historian or academic). My co-presenters were super great to be in a group with and it was nice to make some connections that way.
The best part, though, is that I'm done. No more looming deadlines, no more panicking about whether I'm up to snuff. It is over. And, once I was done, I took the opportunity to take some pictures of mountains. I never tire of mountains. It was a great way to celebrate my mental freedom ("No more presentation to stress about! Hooray!") Enjoy my celebration!
*There is a reason why I was envisioning an auditorium, and it is not because of my ego. It is because I attended a similar conference earlier in the year and it did have an auditorium. The brain fills in the unknown with what it can, and in this case it was something much scarier than the reality.
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