stop being afraid of success

I seriously hope that this Alaska job pulls through.

Max said I for certain had the job… but geez, just waiting and everything… this would seriously fuck up so many things if it fell through.
I’m just keeping my fingers crossed every single day.

Sooo fortunate he’s paying for my ticket to get to Seattle, and the company will pay my way from there to Anchorage, then (I think) I’ll take another company plane from there to Naknek.

PULL THROUGH, PLEASE!!

: /

This would be the biggest breakthrough with fear 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.

Today I was given the opportunity to move to Alaska and help my cousin make some money.

...who knows.

I only have one thing schedueled for next year.
And it’s pretty big.
I was going to spend three to six months hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada (or as far as I can legally get to the Canadian border – I think you’ll need a passport by then, and I’m not eligible).

So, this is pretty confusing.

He’s staying in a hostel right now.
That is pretty neat to me.

Ahh, lots more thinking to do.

The cool thing about Alaska (no pun intended!) is you get that check every year.
I only have to live there for one year to be eligible for the check.
I did some research for a few minutes on Google, and it hasn’t been below $900 since 1990.
It was as low as $335 (give or take a few dollars) in the mid-eighties.

Hmm.

Someone on Flickr sent me the sweetest message!

Captivating.

I love your work.

Peace and love.

Wow.
Everybody always tells me that I “should be”/”need to be” the things that I’m pretty good at, but I just do it mostly for fun.

I created a charcoal drawing of a woman holding a hat when I was in the eighth grade, and my Science teacher then, Mr. Homer, offered to buy it for $800.

It’s now hanging downstairs in my mom’s home in this gorgeous huge frame.

But back then, I didn’t know the meaning of the value of art.
I thought that if you made something great, people admired it, and you still get to keep it.
I couldn’t dream of letting something go that I liked.

So I kept it.

I get so many offers from time to time from people who either want to buy something of mine, or they want to see it blown up and on a wall.
Poster-like.

Who knows.

I know that I could be successful.

And I shared a lot of my ad and tagline ideas with Bryan when I was in Vegas, and he kept egging me on to get into advertising.

I’m just so damn hardheaded, I don’t want to do what everybody expects of me, even if it’ll make my name a kind of… household name, I guess.

If I played soccer and was great at it and everybody wanted me to be a professional soccer player to go off and make millions of dollars, I would be a computer programmer.
Or a Special Olympics coach and coordinator.

I don’t know why I work like that.

But hey, going against the grain kind of runs in the family.

But I don’t know anyone in my family that has taken it to this kind of extremity.

Ahhhh oh well…

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.

My dad keeps telling me that I’m afraid of success, that I’m just like him when it comes to success.

I seriously disagree, but maybe I really am. I don’t know if I should’ve put this as a goal without believing it.
He’s never told me that in my entire life until a month or two ago.

And now he says it every other frickin day.

Who knows!

need to work on this on right now :)

sometimes, I forget to get out of my own way

I want success
Yet I fear it
I think about success
Yet I panic when it approaches
I say I want to be successful
But deep inside I am not sure that’s true

Some people say I already am successful

I don’t believe them

And I continue to yearn for “success”
and continue to fear it

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.