ABSTRACT
For new scholars, myself included, reading and writing theory can be a project of stomach-quivering anxiety and trepidation. My first brushes with grand theory were uncomfortable, intimidating, uninviting. Though I have always been an almost obsessive reader, for many years I was so resistant to theory I even thought of myself as being anti-theory, in what I now understand was an attempt to reject a conversation that I was sure would reject me. Much of this had to do with assumptions that some of my prior teachers had about theory, and about me as someone without potential as a theorizer.
