Fear, presence or absence of
Stupid commenting system sucks. I am seriously underimpressed with Typepad currently. Instead of a comment to this, then (and also a bit of a response to this — Trackback in Typepad also sucks):
Although Dorothea says it wasn’t about my fear — I didn’t think she was putting me in the group of people who never take risks out of paralysing fear. Not that I’m not risk averse, but that’s mostly about extreme sports — it was, a bit:
And they lack, utterly, the fear that Wolfangel feels right now.
I do feel some fear about being worthless, or whatever adjective pops up. But that is really not about fear, it’s about some vein of depression. I don’t feel fear about my future. I’d like to see that it all works out wonderfully (I forgot to mention the part where I also win a big lottery; I’d like to see that, too), because I’d like to feel now that I made a good decision. It’s not because I’m worried nothing will work out — my boss seems to think he can give me good advice on this, and I’m also planning to create course outlines and apply for Cegep jobs teaching humanities. (Not that I’m clear about how I could fit a linguistics course into “ethics”. Knowledge and world views are easy. Ethics? I don’t know. Something about all languages being equal? Maybe not.) This isn’t my primary goal, and without teaching experience I’m not sure how competitive I’d be, but it can’t hurt.
The reason I’d like to see I made a good decision is that I keep that faint hope that this will be the thing that, finally, makes me feel maybe I’m okay. Doubtful. I am not the poster girl for sanity.
So I keep going. I’m waiting to meet with my bos\s to see what he thinks I should do to get into computational linguistics/machine learning kind of work. I’m waiting to see if I got into that programming-for-the-real-world program I applied to, and to see if it’s even a worthwhile move for me to make. It’s 12 months, but the last 15 weeks are a stage. I can keep working parttime for the next number of months. I have another month worth of money from my ex-department coming in — 2, maybe even 3 paycheques. I have almost 2000c(US!) coming from federal and state tax refunds, about 60 from Canadian — and I don’t owe as much Quebec taxes as that. Next year I will get ALL the US taxes I paid returned, because I will have received less than 10k. In September I’m getting my deposit back, which will be 500 (if the spare room never gets rented out) to 1100 (if it gets rented for June). It’s really really comforting not to be worried about money. Also the living at home = no major expenses thing. But I want to move out once my life is settled again.
Anyways. Where was I? Fear, presence or absence of. I can tell mostly I’m not, because I can sleep again. So mostly I am happy and mostly I am comfortable with my decision. And then obviously I’m also not because, hey, I’m obsessing! I’ll go out for breakfast tomorrow and tell a good friend everything I’ve posted here and everything I’ve read and she’ll tell me how good a decision it was. Then we’ll have ice cream. I’ll appreciate the support my parents have been giving me in this. I’ll get very annoyed as I watch my neighbour’s cat, Oreo, chase Sam. No, that’s right now. Oreo is such a pest. Leave my cat alone. You outweigh him 47 to 1. Or close to that, anyways. Oreo is a big cat, and also a fat one. Moving on.
I need time. I mentioned I still feel spite towards some people. I will admit that I feel spite towards someone I haven’t seen since grade 5 (it’s failed utterly, since apparently she’s a successful lawyer in LA). I don’t exactly think about her often — today because I’m considering the issue, and the last time a year or two ago when my mother ran into her mother, not for years before that — but when I do it’s with a “well, I wouldn’t help you, and actually I sort of hope you fail”. There are other people like that. I don’t live shaking with anger. I do take time to move on. When I give myself it — and am given it — it works. I figure this is unlikely to be that much different. I hope I am giving myself time. It’s hard to tell sometimes. Whether or not I am, there time goes.
It’s still hard.
I think that my story is in many ways like Dorothea’s. All the details are very different, but the stories are indeed much the same. I was too busy *before* I left to have too much angst — now, not so much busy. I can only hope it will turn out as well as hers did.
May 26th, 2004 at 4:58 pm
Maybe “fear” was the wrong word, indeed. But I still think the sense of personal worthlessness is connected up with the obsessive Calvinism in academia.
I also think it’ll pass.
May 26th, 2004 at 7:45 pm
Obsessive Calvinism. That’s it exactly: that combination of constantly wondering if you are among the worthy and intense guilt whenever you are not acting as a “worthy” person should.
One good thing about currently holding a boring, too-easy job with my main salvation being surfing the net is that I have nearly (but not entirely) shucked off the guilt I used to feel when I was not “being productive.”
I still struggle with the worthy thing — which is why you have my sympathy, wolfangel — it’s hard enough living up to others’ standards; it’s far more difficult feeling like you’re not living up to your own (even if they are not really your own, but versions of other people’s).
Is Oreo a fat black and white cat? There must be something genetic about bossiness and tuxedo cats!
May 26th, 2004 at 10:16 pm
I think that your exhibited a great deal of bravery in leaving a program once you determined that you didn’t want it. Lots of people just plow ahead with blinders on, unwilling to consider changes in life that necessitate a different road. Real fear is found when one cannot break ties with something that no longer works, or admit that things have changed and the best course of action is a *different* one that previously planned.
Everything that you’ve written points to your logical consideration of options and needs, and probable eventual recovery from this transition. And that’s all it is. Life is full of them.
May 26th, 2004 at 10:17 pm
PS my dog is named Oreo. She’s a big fat black and white dalmation mix. But we call her Reo for some reason.
May 27th, 2004 at 2:15 am
Michelle puts it well. Life is full of change and you are someone who is willing to admit that. That is brave. And hard: it’ll make you wonder about your own judgement. And it’ll also make you angry, spiteful, resentful - because there are all these people who never appear to have any doubts. But (to quote someone whose opinion I trust in these matters - I keep mentioning her in comments, one of these days I’ll write a whole post about her) perhaps they’ve just never opened those doors in themselves. Never looked inside themselves and acknowledged the more problematic parts.
There was this article on the Yoga Journal (can’t find the referenc unfortunately, will keep looking though) website recently with a parable that fits here: to get across a wide river you could spend ten years learning through mystical practice to walk on water. Or, you can just pay the ferryman and get across now. The point is, acknowledging what you feel is like paying the ferryman: it lets you get across the river now, through all the pain and anger or whatever other feelings these imprecise terms cover - instead of making you waste ten years of your life learning to walk on water.
May 27th, 2004 at 2:18 am
Rana - I don’t know if all tuxedo cats are bossy… one of my sister’s cats is a tuxedo cat. He’s actually mostly a bit scared: he gets bossed around by her other cat, a female orange tabby. They love each other despite this power arrangement though… Or maybe because of it? Who knows.
May 27th, 2004 at 9:37 am
I think that calling academia obsessive Calvinism is right on the money. It certainly exacerbated any feeling I had of not being good enough — something I had never felt about myself (with respect to school) in high school.
What’s so hard is when your standards for yourself aren’t possible to live up to. I’m working on that; it was strongly about my academic work, so when that goes, so should the feeling. My goal, anyhow. I don’t feel incompetent at my job (which, admittedly, would be really pitiful — the job isn’t hard). I even believe that people think I’m good at it. I forgot how *nice* that is (to feel).
LiL, it’s funny, because there’s one person who was in my program and I often felt irritated with her — because she seemed unable to see that things change and that doubts were reasonable. I liked her; I still hope she’ll be successful. But she was so *irritating* when we’d talk about some things.
May 27th, 2004 at 9:39 am
Also: Oreo is a tuxedo cat. He’s not ours, he just comes for the food. It’s not that he’s bossy exactly. I think he doesn’t like other cats, whicih is a problem because this is a neighbourhood with a lot of them.
He’s a little fat, but not particularly. He’s just a big cat. Especially compared to mine, which makes me sad, because I love big cats, and mine are sort of runty (for me). But they have lots of fur and big paws.
February 23rd, 2007 at 1:52 am
I’m a student at a local community college taking ENGL 51. One of our homework assignments is to pick an essay topic on a p in our mandated textbook out of 20. I picked #4 which is: My fear of flying (or some other fear) prevents me from living a normal life. This post & responses to the/this post have helped me with my essay and any other posts/responses to posts on the subject of fear, presence of would help me a lot even more on my essay. So please everybody please make more posts/responses to posts on this subject.
February 23rd, 2007 at 1:53 am
To help me more with my essay. I want to get an A in the/this class/course!