Academic writer imposter syndrome is real when you teach lit all day then go home and doubt your own manuscript

I teach contemporary American literature, and I've published academic articles, presented at conferences, written scholarly books, but I've worked on a novel for five years and the experience of trying to get it published has been humbling in ways I didn't expect.

There's something deeply strange about spending your days teaching students about the canon, discussing what makes literature important, analyzing work of celebrated authors, and then going home and staring at your own manuscript wondering if it's even readable.

I think I've got a pretty good critical eye when it comes to other people's work like I can tell you exactly why a particular novel succeeds or fails, what techniques the author's using, how it fits into larger literary conversations, but applying that same critical lens to my own writing is paralyzing and I end up revising the same paragraph seventeen times instead of actually moving forward.

Eventually I did finish the thing and sent query letters to agents for about a year before giving up but the feedback was always that some version of this is well written but we don't know how to sell it, which feels like the story of contemporary literary fiction in general right? Beautiful prose that nobody wants to buy.

So now I'm considering self publishing which feels like admitting defeat in some ways, like I couldn't make it in the real literary world so I'm taking my ball and going home, but also why should I care? I wrote a book I'm proud of, why shouldn't I just put it out there and see who connects with it?

Has anyone else here navigated the weird space between academic literary study and creative writing practice? How do you shut off the critical brain long enough to actually create something?