stop being afraid of success

In addition to my actual job, I have a ton of stuff going on this spring:

• One more webinar to give (2 already done)
• Poster presentation on Wednesday
• Attending evidence based medicine class in Chicago with two of my bestest and favoritist medlib friends end of March. Woohoo!
• Another professional presentation on April 3 (which I haven’t started)
• Another on May 5 (which I haven’t started either)
• Organizing continuing ed class and board meeting for professional organization on June 5
• Still considering submitting proposals for one or two fall conferences: one national, one state. These are due at the end of March.

• 2 webinars
• professional presentation at faculty conference
• submitted review to journal

I suppose this isn’t terrible, given that I’ve been at my new job for just a bit over two months. It seems like longer. I’ve had all my regular work stuff to do as well, so I guess I have to give myself some credit. I’ll try to remind myself of all that I have achieved when I’m certain I’m failing.

Feeling very, very, very anxious today. We are scheduled to spend the next few days at a friend’s lake cabin, which sounds great, except that I have done nothing to prepare for the two big interviews that start almost immediately after our return home. I’m taking my laptop and relevant stuff to read, but I worry I will procrastinate and not get enough done. For these interviews, there is a definite expectation that candidates prepare and do research ahead of time. These are librarians, after all :) Each interview involves a major presentation as well. Folks will notice if I am unprepared. I feel a bit twitchy that I won’t have much Internet access over the next few days. I suppose I will not be able to distract myself with Internet activities, but I also won’t be able to do additional research.

On the other hand, if I stay home without the sweetie, I worry that I will slip into a funk and won’t get anything done at all. So, I guess I’ll pull myself together, pack, print out a bunch of articles to read, and put myself into the car. Holy crap.

need to work on this on right now :)

sometimes, I forget to get out of my own way

I need to both stop being afraid of success and accept that I won’t do everything perfectly. Both. At the same time.

In a former life, long ago, I was a classical cellist. Between the ages of roughly 9 and 20, being a cellist was my identity, at least so far as the rest of the world was concerned, and it was expected that I would go on to become a professional. I wasn’t a prodigy, but I had a knack for it – a natural affinity – and I liked it. Correction: I loved it, with a painful, overwhelming, raw kind of love. Playing music opened me up like nothing else before or since and it hurt sometimes, like air on an open wound. I found joy in playing, too, of course, but often I felt like I could never measure up, never meet the demands of the music and of the classical music world. I always felt like I was utterly failing. The hardest thing, though, was that I never felt music was mine. My mother sank her claws in my music and never let go. Neither my successes nor my failures were mine, ever. Then, when I was in the midst of getting truly serious about it, while I was at conservatory, I walked away from music to try to forge a new life, to go where no one knew me as a musician, to start anew.

Now, many years later, I’ve found a new love and a new identity and boy, howdy, am I scared. I love librarianship and libraryland more than I can tell you and, again, I think I have a knack for it. I’m terrified of failing and terrified of succeeding. I want to succeed in this career more than I can possibly express. I wish I saw it as just a job. I wish I didn’t feel like I had be be some kind of uberlibrarian rock star. I wish being competent and doing the work were enough for me. My colleagues and my professors respect and like me. They tell me I do good work. Shouldn’t that be enough? Why all the fear and anxiety? I have another chance to create my own professional life and identity and, this time, the only person in my way is me.