mired in negative self-talk

Thanks guys.

I do wish I could believe more of what Dave said right now, but I just feel like a big giant FAIL at everything...because it's the time of year when the students start stressing, and that comes out sometimes as disrespectful behavior. And Rude Boy has come back to the youth group after a hiatus and has made it very hard to keep teaching effectively. I feel like the kids aren't learning a thing and I'm seriously tempted, next time, to pull a fiver out of my wallet and say that I will give it to the first person who can tell me what the lesson was about the week before. (And then sit back and wait for the crickets.)

So I'm not having a whole lot of success. I'm glad that the little knitting mishap I had last night on a gift I'm making happened then and not tonight, or I probably would have wound up either ripping the whole thing out or throwing it across the room.

I am not so good at being patient with myself.

I think I'm also messed up because my immune system is jacked up and on high alert - I had the Norovirus earlier this week (trust me, you do not want it). I just got over feeling like I was going to hurl every 20 minutes this morning. I'm still kind of fatigued.

I've cried a whole lot today. Not in front of anyone - in my office with the door closed, in my car in the parking lot, and now at home. I'm sure part of that is the fatigue and the after effects of the virus, but I'm still upset.

I actually said to myself: "If you were to disappear tomorrow, people would only notice when the crap tasks that only you are willing to do didn't get done." And I said, "You should just give away your yarn and quilting supplies, and spend all your waking hours working on making your teaching and research better because obviously you are not working hard enough at it."

The problem is I'm very bad at looking at a situation where things didn't go my way, and evaluating intelligently how much of it is "ricki screwed up" vs. how much is "the time wasn't right" vs. "the other people involved are mistaken/wrong/a-hats"

I tend to go to that first option and stick with it. Every "failure" that's happened in my life, I tend to blame myself for, and take it as evidence that I'm not good enough.

I think I mentioned this before, but I was "asked to leave" the first graduate program I tried. I know now that it was because they had an overlarge crop of new grad students and had been looking for ones to dump, and because I switched my area of interest between applying and starting the program, so I wound up with a new adviser who didn't really advise me very much.

But at the time, I took it as evidence that I was stupid and incapable and would probably be best seeking a career in the Food Services (i.e., flipping burgers).

Well, obviously that didn't happen. But it took me years to get over the perception that I "flunked out of grad school" because of my own personal suckage and for no other reason.

Every failure since then, I guess I kind of flash back to that. I know, I need to lay down some other mental patterns - like about how I went on to another grad school later on and succeeded. And how I got my dissertation research published after 4 tries.

(Actually, I do feel a little better now, thinking about that).

But I hate that I have few enough frames of reference in which I measure 'success.' Being a "nice person" isn't good enough, because I feel like the default condition should be to be a "nice person" or to be polite to others or any of that stuff that I do. And it's hard for me to look at something I knitted or a quilt I made and consider it a "success" in the same way that I would consider a teaching award or a successfully published paper a "success" because...well, it has no bearing on my job.

That's the rub. I wouldn't care about it nearly so much but there are all those markers of success you need to hit in order to be considered a success at your job.

The sad thing is, at least in some departments, you can be a real a-hole to your students (and even your colleagues), but if you crank out the papers, you're golden. But on the other hand, if you're friendly and nice but don't win awards or don't get lots of publications - you're seen as ineffective at best.

(And I worry about the new university president...what changes he may make. How he may want to up the profile of the school by pushing for more publications. And I don't want to be "ineffective" under a new administration.)

So I don't know. Maybe the demon on my shoulder is right and I do need to get quit of all my hobbies, maybe even dump some of the volunteer work I do, because they're not what matters when promotion time comes around.

(You know what's sad? I think that's part of why it's so hard to get people to do volunteer work. I was just at a committee meeting this afternoon when they were bemoaning how few volunteers they had. And I think it's because people don't want to do anything that doesn't directly advance them, that doesn't get them ahead. And in this economy, I can't quite blame people for wanting to put in more hours at the office to look good).

So I don't know. I think part of it comes down to an old - and ironically, perhaps religiously-related argument: Do you do what the world values, and emphasize that? Or do you recognize that the world is just "the world" and that you need to emphasize the really important things? And where does rendering unto Caesar come into the equation, work-wise?

I have a hard time knowing how to balance work and relaxation. I go too far in one direction or the other and then I feel bad, and then I go the other direction. I feel like I should be allowed SOME down-time and SOME hobby-time, especially as I have no children and other folks go home at the end of the day and read their kids stories and coach their soccer teams and stuff. But I don't know.

I hate that I am always making this grown-up thing up as I go along. I wish there were some kind of instruction manual that we were given at 18 that explained the expectations and such.