Miscellanea, Part 9

I got another email from a job recruiter, this one much closer to home, at an institution just up the road. Maybe because this one was closer to home — and there were no palm trees — I didn’t play “what if” this time. I also happen to know that there has been a revolving door of people in and out of this particular role and that seems indicative of a problem with the job itself and that, too, makes me uninterested.

But it also has to do with the fact that I love my job, though there were some years where I was looking around.

I saw someone on Notes say that their ideal job as someone with ADHD was professional idea generator, unlimited ideas, absolutely no responsibility for implementation. I used to work for someone like that. As I said when I re-Stacked it on Notes, it was not great, Bob. She was constantly generating ideas and sometimes they were borderline unhinged and if you pushed back in any way, outlining the difficulties or challenges, she would give you this look like you just weren’t trying hard enough. Unfortunately, my people pleasing tendencies and my pathological need to succeed at everything meant that I almost always made it work, even if it meant nearly killing myself in the process. And unfortunately, the more successful I was over the years, the more outrageous her ideas became and on top of that we also developed a dynamic in which anything that required effort she offloaded on to me. I used to almost want to fail at something to teach her a lesson, but of course I couldn’t do that. And the afterglow of the dopamine rush from the praise I’d receive from the people who loved whatever it was would make me sort of forget how terrible the whole process had been, sort of like oxytocin after childbirth. All of this worsened during the middle of the pandemic when I was the only person in the office. We were a small team already and by the time she retired I was doing the work of three people. My new supervisor, who is great, made it a point when he was hired to a) get me a promotion and a raise and b) take some of the jobs off my plate. There are times now when I feel like I don’t have enough to do, but I think that’s just a residual feeling from when I was doing too much. Like, I’ve lost perspective on what’s a normal amount of work. Anyway, if you’re one of those people who think the professional idea generator sounds like your perfect job, maybe check on anybody who works for you and see how they feel about it.

*****

It’s that awful time of year where I don’t know what the hell to wear. This morning it was 31 degrees and by this afternoon it will be 70. I am sick to death of my winter clothes and it’s mid-March and so my thoughts have turned to spring, but I feel like a knob walking through campus with my very pale ankles out. And my little ankles were freezing this morning! But boots feel wrong, too. I feel like this is a shoe issue, like there is a gap in my wardrobe for some kind of mid-season shoe. If you have suggestions, hit me up.

*****

Relatedly, I had what I call a wardrobe crisis this morning because I have an event tonight at which there will be some women with significant wealth and I find that being around wealthy people, pretty much a requirement in my job, can activate some latent insecurities I have about growing up what I thought was middle class but was probably actually on the poor side?¹ I don’t know. When I’m around wealthy women in particular, I am very conscious of my clothes and my shoes. I am not a person who has ever felt comfortable spending a lot of money on clothes (this topic could probably withstand a whole post of its own) and I feel like that is a glaring difference. In my experience, shoes and hair are a clear indicator of wealth. The shoes of wealthy women often look like it’s the first time they’ve been worn and their hair is always smoooooth and so shiny. Like, their hair wouldn’t dare frizz. And many of the women will look like they shopped at the same boutique² — and they very well may have — and it looks great on them, but I know that if I tried to wear the same thing then I would look like I was wearing someone else’s clothes because their style is not my style. It’s a really weird feeling to want to fit in, but also not? Anyway, the fact that I’m a klutz means that I am often rough on shoes and because I’m cheap I don’t retire shoes when I should and so I often feel like it’s immediately obvious that I am firmly middle class. Which is not a bad thing! I just find that sometimes I have to give myself a pep talk and remind myself that I am good at my job and I’m friendly and welcoming and I’m good at making conversation and I am an interesting person.

*****

It’s funny all the ways anxiety presents itself. Not funny-haha, obviously, but kind of incredible really when you begin to recognize it. Like grief, anxiety can mimic a lot of other feelings. The nervous-tummy-panicky-feeling anxiety from a few weeks ago has now morphed into let-me-overthink-every-interaction kind of anxiety. I’ve realized, too, that my occasional need to listen to a single song all day long and/or my desire to listen to the same playlist over and over is simply an overwhelmed nervous system seeking equilibrium.

Earlier this morning I came across this post in my Substack feed, and boy did it resonate.

This, for one:

“But no one told him that the woman he married might reach a point where her entire nervous system, her identity, her unresolved history, and her deepest unlived truths all converge at once—and that the force of that convergence can level a life.”

And this, for another:

“The things she tolerated for years become intolerable. The conversations she avoided become urgent. The resentments she buried begin to surface with a force that frightens her. The emotional labor she performed invisibly: the remembering, the anticipating, the managing of everyone else’s inner world, feels like it is crushing her.

And she does not understand why.

She thinks something is wrong with her. She thinks she is becoming irrational, ungrateful, impossible to live with. She looks at her life and cannot understand why it suddenly feels so suffocating when nothing has technically changed.

But something has changed. Her body has stopped cooperating with her own disappearance.”

Something to chew on. Anyhoo, happy Thursday!

1. I never felt poor. I always had what I needed and usually what I wanted, too, but things my mother has said to me since I’ve reached adulthood make me realize that money was a lot tighter than I ever knew.

2. The older generation among them look like they all went to the same scarf tying class.