shame and renewal

Yesterday I backed into what I hope will be a big turning point for me. A co-worker delivered a response to my question that made plain her disdain for my lack of productivity on one of the primary tasks for which I was hired. This sent me into a downward spiral of shame, not because I'd been unaware of my underperformance, but because no one else in the office had made an issue of it, so I'd allowed myself to keep shelving it, too. I've been letting myself hide in the type of work that I'm comfortable with, for which I wasn't hired, instead of doing the work that appealed to me about the job in the first place. Mostly, I think, I've been doing this because I'm inexperienced, feel overwhelmed and don't have a mentor on that front to guide me. But her comment made clear that she's been keeping tabs on me, and that she's not impressed. In an office of six people, one person's opinion matters a lot, but more important than hers is mine: I'm not impressed, either.

I think I've been lazy, in handling various matters in my life, for a long time. I've required a deadline or a necessity for action; I haven't been pro-active on many fronts; I've hemmed and hawed, and then I've lamented my lukewarm bath. My co-worker's point is a simple one: I have no one to blame but myself for the underwhelming situations in which I find myself. I'm smart, capable and privileged: it's on me to make things happen. I just have to decide that I want them to happen.

Spurred by this culpability, I quickly wrote to a variety of people I know who can help me make something happen at work. Two wrote back immediately to set up meetings. I don't know why I hadn't written to them before--maybe because the range of obstacles seemed larger and more dense. Narrowing it down to one obstacle, myself alone, made it manageable.

But that small validation didn't do much to assuage my feeling small, lazy and worthless. Even an extracurricular project work session, in which I think I made a positive contribution, didn't do it. I spent three hours walking around SoHo and the Lower East Side in increasingly uncomfortable Chuck Taylors feeling alone and like I didn't want or deserve companionship because I am a slothful, non-committal leach. It was as low a feeling as I've felt in over a year. But it also felt comfortable, familiar, and even reassuring: I've spent more time feeling that way as an adult than not, and this relapse was kind of a homecoming. That's self-indulgent and masochistic, I realize, but I wonder if that's just who I am, and a place to build from. After all that wandering, I finally sat down for the midnight screening of Synecdoche, New York, which issued both a warning and a validation on this front: sure, the Phillip Seymour Hoffman character is overwhelmed by insecurities, but look! Charlie Kaufman, who must have a lot of these insecurities, too, made this weird and ambitious movie! So there can be productivity to come out of self-loathing, too.

I've spent the day in bed, hiding from foul weather inside and out, not sure what my next move is. I feel like now is as good a time as any to start a new chapter in my life, but I'm still not sure how to do that in a way that will last and will feel authentic. I'm not hopeless; I've been here before. I just want to find a new way out that doesn't lead me back.