Wash it down the drain

As I think of how unprepared I feel to do most of the jobs I find on the job hunt, and how scary everything seems, and how hard and how much work, I often think I’m trying and failing to do something I have no business doing.  I know that my life has been a never ending cycle of me thinking I don’t have the competence to do something, and then doing it well.  And I know I earned my degree, and I did well in my fieldwork, and I’m doing at least well enough not to get fired with my current position, but none of that makes me feel prepared or capable of doing 99% of the library jobs I see.

As I sat (alone.  In the dark.  If you must know) tonight, dwelling on that very issue, I couldn’t help thinking about how I’ve set myself up for failure by trying to do something I’m just not good enough to do, and then I thought: “All because it was so fucking important for people to think I’m smart.”

I mentioned before why I chose to be a librarian, and all of that was true, but it’s also true that my motivation for a lot of things in life stems from wanting to show that I’m smart (and in my previous explanation, that was indeed my reason for getting into reading before I found that book that really made me into reading).

I know “Librarian” doesn’t say “genius” the way a medical degree or something would, but I’m not smart enough for a medical degree.  But I am (or thought I would be) smart enough to be a librarian.  And hey, librarians are considered smart.

The only problem is, now that I’m trying to get that job I really don’t think I’m smart enough at all.  I mean, I’m smart at a few things.  Reading, of course.  Logic, of the “if X, then Y” variety.  And I was a good student because of that, being able to see patterns easily.  I still remember one example.  Elementary school, some guest speaker was talking to us all, grades 1-6.  I was probably somewhere in grades 1-3, can’t say where for sure.  He had a long rectangular box with doors on both sides, and he put a ball in one side and asked where it was.  Someone pointed to the side he put the ball in.  He tilted the box so the ball rolled to the other side, then opened the door the kid pointed at to reveal it wasn’t there, and asked again where the ball was.  Another kid points to the side the ball rolled to, and he tilted the box the other way… etc.  This went on for several rounds, and I was /dying/ for him to call on me.  I couldn’t believe that no one else had figured it out.  Simple, point to where the ball isn’t and he’ll tilt it and that’s where the ball will be.  Simple pattern recognition, right?  He was calling on all the older kids, and none of them got it.  I’m sure I was one of the few who did.  He even made a comment at some point, along the lines of “you’d think they’d figure it out by now” before giving up completely.

And in the post I linked to above, you see that my kindergarten teacher didn't think it was even possible for someone to read fluently at the age of 5 until I was her student.

So where does all this insecurity come from?  This driving need for people to see me as intelligent?  Easy.  I had another trait as a small child: I liked making people laugh.  So I tried to do that at every chance I got, getting myself a bit of a "class clown" reputation.  I didn't know it at first, but apparently the stereotype is that class clowns are dumb.  That's just the stereotype: the kid seeks attention because he's not good at anything else.  I eventually realized that the other students weren't aware of the smarts I had, they were only aware of the clown persona, and applied all the usual stereotypes to it.  Everyone was treating me like an idiot, and it was the worst feeling in the world.  I never got over that.  to this day nothing gets under my skin quite like someone insulting my intelligence.

Therefore, it was important to me all my life that people see me as smart.  Therefore, reading and higher education.  Therefore, librarian.  When I dig further back into my past than the post linked above, I see it was my insecurity that took me here and drove me right off the cliff of failure.

The thing is, even though I was actually a pretty sharp little kid, none of that potential I had amounted to anything.  I think I was an exceptional child who, through sheer lack of motivation, became an average adult.

I spoke before about a song lyric that applies to my life, or more specifically, the part of my life I describe in this blog.  There’s another song lyric, much less optimistic, that also applies.  From a song called Farewell Mona Lisa:

“Don’t you ever try to be more than you were destined for, or anything worth fighting for.”

That one hits me every time.  I feel like that’s exactly what I did.  I bit off more than I could chew, tried to become something more than I was worth.  And now this is my life: struggling and fighting to do something that I don’t honestly believe I can do, and the thought of doing it scares me senseless.  Fail or succeed, I feel like neither option can end well for me.

All those employers I’ve sent resumes to have been right not to put their trust in me.