Apparently, she does not have very high self-esteem. A
letter writer who dubs herself Anxious and Lost writes to New York Magazine’s
advice column, Ask Polly, to confess that she feels like a “steaming pile of
human garbage.” She feels like she is a bullshitter and that she might just be
bullshit. At least she feels her feelings.
Since Polly herself has mastered the art
of bullshit, AL has come to the right place. Clearly, if AL had wanted to get
over her tendency to bullshit and especially to whine and complain she would
not have written to Polly… a kindred spirit if ever there was one.
At first glance, AL is suffering from a distinctly modern
condition. It does not take too much imagination to figure out where she ever
got the idea, but she believes that without a career her life is worthless.
Does she need career counseling? The last time she sought it out she found it
in the words of a psychic. Naturally, she followed the psychic’s advice and,
would you believe, it worked out badly.
It turns out that AL has a boyfriend. She has friends and family. She says that she
whines to them all the time. Might it not be better for her to stop whining to her sweet boyfriend so
that perhaps he might want to marry her? Then, she might find her true calling
as a wife and mother. Yes, I understand that such thoughts are anathema, but
what are blogs for if not to speak the unspeakable.
Anyway, her priorities are out of whack. And she feels even
worse since she has a twin sister who is an overachiever and who apparently
does not spend her days and nights complaining about everything that is wrong
with her life.
Want to hear AL’s version of her tale of woe? Here it is:
For
most of my 20s, I dreamed about doing my Ph.D. I worked a couple of
well-paying, practical office jobs that I hated, and I was miserable. I paid
off my loans. I saved. Every few months, I would have an existential crisis
where I would try to think of the career paths that might lead me to happiness,
and every time I was convinced that doing a Ph.D. was the only way to go. I
wanted someone to tell me what to do, or to give me permission to do what
seemed crazy but felt right. On my 28th birthday, my wish came true. I saw a
psychic who told me that I was a teacher, and I burst out laughing with relief.
Finally, someone who saw me! She told me that I would be accepted to two
schools to do my Ph.D. I applied to two schools and got into both.
Before proceeding, note the phrase: she is looking to find a
career path that will lead her to happiness.
In any case, I recommend that AL go easier on the
scatology. It isn’t ladylike.
I do
think it was important for me to try grad school for myself and realize that I
hated it. But, Polly, I feel like a steaming pile of human garbage, and when I
look into the future, it just feels bleak. I can’t stop comparing myself to
other people my age. It feels like everyone has their shit figured out, or at
least enough that they are doing jobs that don’t make them want to kill
themselves and are making enough money that they can afford to pay rent, save a
bit, take vacations, and do nice things for the people they love. I know
comparing yourself to others is a recipe for disaster, but it’s impossible for
me not to, considering I have an identical twin sister (whom I love and am very
close to) who has never been unemployed, never made a wrong career move, and
makes more money than I can ever imagine earning. I’ve gone back to work part
time at a service-industry job, but I’m only getting two shifts a week and I’m
terrified of what the next few months will look like. I feel like an infant. I
had no backup plan. I had grad school on a pedestal for so long that I don’t
know how to imagine anything else.
As one reads this, one gets the impression that AL is out
there on her own, detached from other people, living a solitary life. As it
happens, she has a boyfriend… so we are puzzled to hear her whining about how
she seems to want to do it all by herself.
I don’t
know how to get rid of this belief that other people can see me better than I
see myself. My whole life I’ve just wanted people to tell me who I am and what
I should do. I just want to be at the part where I don’t have to worry anymore.
I want the career that feels life-affirming. I want to be financially
comfortable. I want to have disposable income again so I can take piano lessons
or a writing class. I want to love myself and be healed from my stupid traumatic
upbringing. I want to settle down. Going through the mess of figuring it all
out just feels exhausting and unfair. I thought I would have had it all sorted
out by now. I don’t know how much more uncertainty my self-esteem can endure.
This paragraph tells us that she has done too much therapy.
In truth, as research, especially that of Tasha Eurich, has pointed out, other
people always see us more clearly than we see ourselves.
One can question precisely how traumatic her upbringing was,
since her twin sister does not seem to have suffered from it. Anyway, the
paragraph is pure psychobabble. One suspects that her anguish and despair have
been fostered, if not produced, by a dumbass therapist.
Naturally, AL’s friends are trying to help her out. They recommend
that she regress to her girlhood and ask what she liked doing at the time. It
feels like good advice, but it’s really bad advice. Still, Polly lights on it
and sees AL as a creative, emotional person who loves beauty. AL does not know
what to do with her love of beauty, and Polly will tell her to become an artist
or something. In truth, if you love beauty you can also go to work in a flower
shop, but I digress.
Anyway, here’s the rest of the letter:
Recently
someone close to me asked me what I liked doing when I was a kid. The things
that really mattered to me then still really matter to me now: books, music,
and art. I think I’m obsessed with beauty, and I think there’s something there.
But how do I turn that into … well, anything? My résumé is a fucking mess. I
have no experience being paid to do the things I care about. I don’t even make
time for them as hobbies anymore, not even with all the free time I have since
dropping out of school. Lately, I’ve been considering going back to school to
become a therapist, but the thought of spending more money on school makes me
feel queasy. And the question of which jobs to work while I save up to be able
to do that just makes me feel like crawling into bed and sleeping for six
months. I feel bad for still not having my shit together. I feel bad for my
sweet boyfriend, who has to put up with me, and for my family and friends, who
have listened to me whine incessantly for YEARS about how every job sucks and
then had to listen to me gush for a year about how grad school was going to
save me, only to have to watch me go through the crisis of realizing that that
was also bullshit. What do I do now that everything feels like bullshit? What
if all of this means that I’m bullshit?
Telling this woman to enter into a creative field is
genuinely bad advice. It’s what you would expect from Polly. The therapy world
has persuaded far too many people that they should become artists. It is
extremely difficult to have a career as an artist. Better to work in a flower
shop.
Yet, the one question that AL is not asking is the only real
question that she should be asking. You may recall, or perhaps you do not, that
famed management consultant Peter Drucker wrote a pamphlet called Managing Oneself. It offers serious
guidance to young people who are looking for career success. In
many corners of the therapy world it should be required reading.
What does Drucker say? He does not tell people to agonize
over finding their passion. He does not tell them to find out what they
really, really want to do. As AL points out so clearly, that approach leads
nowhere. Instead, Drucker recommends that people ask themselves what they are
good at, where their talent lies. Good question that. You gain more
satisfaction from having greater success. And you achieve greater success if
you are pursuing a career in something that you are good at.
Interestingly, if you want to find out what you are good at,
you should not search your soul. You should look at your relative performance,
on different activities. You should ask yourself what other people have told
you about what you are good at. You see, it’s all in other people. They see you more clearly than you see
yourself. And they know what you are really good at better than you do.
2 comments:
An observation as to how women can obtain their education, at least in Canada, is worth noting. A single mom will have her education paid for as well as day care by the government. Every couple years she has another child. The previous one is now in kindergarten and she's enrolled for her next diploma/certificate/degree program. I think the cycle is self evident.
"For most of my 20s, I dreamed about doing my Ph.D."
I think a person who was genuinely interested in a field would dream about working in that field, not about getting a PhD as a generic sort of thing.
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