What the Hell is Wrong With Me?

Why can't I give a shit about work?

I got an email yesterday asking whether the netlist file I use has a typo, and my boss had to respond that those aren't typos - that's the way the inductance divides out if you draw out the schematic. He then sent me a separate email telling me that he expects me to know and understand these netlists before I use them. Which is all understandable and reasonable. I should have looked at the netlists, which I did. I also should have known what the circuit model does, which I didn't and still don't. I have a vague idea that it's breaking up an RLC model into a number of branches, but I'll be darned if I could tell you that the R gets multiplied while the C gets divided without looking it up in a book and running it by a few people.

I stopped thinking for myself at MIT. I saw what truly smart people were able to do and decided that if I couldn't be like that, I wouldn't even try. That is the only plausible explanation I have for this. That I was so intimidated by what else was out there that I abandoned ship, causing an utter disdain/fascination for intellegentsia.

Since then I’ve been trying to get by with the absolute minimum. I keep hoping that something will happen to cause a 180, but it hasn’t happened yet. It gives me the willies worrying that all that potential that people used to see in me has...just...dissappeared.

I don't know why I didn’t care enough to learn anything at MIT. It may have just been too much, too soon. I would have done so much better had I started at 24, with the accumulated years under my belt. But back then...I may have opened up textbooks like everyone else was doing, but I certainly wasn’t absorbing anything from them. Even the classes I liked – the ones I thought easy – I still got C’s because I just didn’t put the effort in. In the bio lab…I didn’t care. I could do the physical job, and be there, but I really wasn’t there. I was thinking about what I was going to do after work, or on the weekend. And now that I have a real job…I’m being forced to admit that I still don’t care. I care enough that when I get stressed and am under deadline, I’ll put my hours in, and get the work done. But I don’t care enough to look at what I’m doing. To actually try and understand what’s going on. To be proactive about learning anything, about anything at all. Easy enough to fix, isn't it? Somehow, it isn't. I try to - I promise myself that Today is going to be The Day that I start learning, and thinking, and working. And then I start reading orangette. or wednesdaychef. Or some venture capital blog that I saw on Kristin's blog. I spend so much time in other people's heads that I can barely have an articulate conversation anymore.

I’m starting to think that this is just the way I am. That while I have the capacity to grasp it all, early on something switched off, and all I’m capable of now is going through a daily grind, thinking very little on my own. When I think about further schooling, the voice inside says “What makes you think it’s going to be any different?” When my dad asks me how I’m going to move up the corporate ladder, the voice says “Why would you want to do that? You’re already underperforming where you are now!”

I'm a big fan of the “work to live, not live to work” philosophy. I just can’t live with the feeling that somehow I lost the ability to even try. I'm so scared of so many things (low performance, being fired, figuring out what I really want to do and being bad at that too...) that it's really pissing me off right now and making me want to cry. And then I feel like a self-pitying little girl who can't deal with the real world and should just go be a receptionist and not think too hard lest she break her pretty little head. Yes, I'm hard on myself. It's another habit that I can't seem to break.

There you have it...the mental dump for the day. I'm scared, I'm scarred, I'm frustrated, I feel helpless, stupid, and awful. God, I feel like I'm back in middle school!

Thank god for these rice crispy treats.