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dragonlady7It's just so hard to keep the necessary faith in yourself when you spend all day, every day, having your basic core competence as a human being questioned. I've been directly and indirectly told today that 1) I'm not competent at business or interpersonal communication, 2) I'm not capable of working with other people, 3) I'm not capable of managing my time, 4) I'm not capable of doing the job I was hired to do, 5) I'm not capable of being trained to do the job I was hired to do, 6) I'm not capable of managing my own files and resources, 7) I'm not capable of keeping to a schedule, and certainly nowhere near capable of coming up with one in the first place, 8) I'm not capable of writing anything myself, 9) I'm not worth being included in the planning of my projects, 10) I'm not worth trying to educate, 11) I'm not earning my keep, 12) I'm not worth salvaging.
And in a way they're right-- every one of those points has something concrete to back it up. Where I defend myself is that I don't feel culpable for many of the failings, and indeed believe that the problem is so widespread that it cannot be blamed on me. (If it's a failing of mine, why has the company got such a high turnover rate of other employees with precisely identical problems?)
But it's cold comfort, and not much of that. Surely, with so many things wrong, they can't all be someone else's fault-- you can add that to my list of faults, a desire to blame others for my shortcomings. And some of these problems, that must lie with me, are so severe that it causes understandable distress when I evaluate my general chances of success in the world. I understand that an inability to "make it" here doesn't translate into an inability to make it anywhere, but if I can't do *any* of those things, how am I going to make it anywhere? Seeking refuge in a daydream of being self-employed only gets me so far. In order for that dream to succeed, I'm going to require certain core competences that, according to my current employers, I totally lack. They can't be right about all of them, or I never would have made it through college. But I can't be so foolish as to imagine that the problem lies entirely with them. To do so is to fail to learn from mistakes, and grow.
But it's hard to figure out where the line is. The longer I spend here, the less sure I am of what's real and what they've tried to convince me is real.
And in a way they're right-- every one of those points has something concrete to back it up. Where I defend myself is that I don't feel culpable for many of the failings, and indeed believe that the problem is so widespread that it cannot be blamed on me. (If it's a failing of mine, why has the company got such a high turnover rate of other employees with precisely identical problems?)
But it's cold comfort, and not much of that. Surely, with so many things wrong, they can't all be someone else's fault-- you can add that to my list of faults, a desire to blame others for my shortcomings. And some of these problems, that must lie with me, are so severe that it causes understandable distress when I evaluate my general chances of success in the world. I understand that an inability to "make it" here doesn't translate into an inability to make it anywhere, but if I can't do *any* of those things, how am I going to make it anywhere? Seeking refuge in a daydream of being self-employed only gets me so far. In order for that dream to succeed, I'm going to require certain core competences that, according to my current employers, I totally lack. They can't be right about all of them, or I never would have made it through college. But I can't be so foolish as to imagine that the problem lies entirely with them. To do so is to fail to learn from mistakes, and grow.
But it's hard to figure out where the line is. The longer I spend here, the less sure I am of what's real and what they've tried to convince me is real.
