Remind me again

I spend a lot of time giving reassurance to people, and sometimes I don't feel comfortable asking for it when I need it. But I need it now.

Back in September, I said:

Even if I do not make Full Professor, that will not make me any less compassionate. It will not make me any less able to help my graduate student finish her degree. It will not make me any less good of a teacher (however good I may be). It will not make me less loyal or less responsible or less able to do stuff well on short notice when asked. It doesn't make me any less important to those people who love me, it doesn't make me love the people I love any less.

.

I need reminding of that now.

(No, I haven't heard anything yet. I think the meeting is supposed to happen in the coming week. But I've been terribly stressed about it this weekend, in part because I had a very vivid "rejection" dream (where I was rejected by someone I cared about) and I also saw one of my committee members at church and he didn't seem all that cheerful or anything. (However, his wife is not well, and I am sure that was what was on his mind). But I keep envisioning in my mind walking in Monday morning and finding a letter in my mailbox, and having it say, "Sorry, no."

And I know that's rather illogical. For one thing, my committee chair asked me last week how the letter-of-approval needed to be addressed. And for another thing, I tell myself that my committee members would NOT have agreed to be my committee members if they didn't have a reasonable expectation of being able to say "yes," because no one here likes to waste time on saying "no" to these kinds of applications, and people are much more prone to gently say, "Maybe you should try again in a few years" when someone asks them to be on a promotions committee if they did not have confidence in that person.)

It's what Anne Lamott referred to as "Radio KFKD," that weird bicameral thing that some of us do in our brains, where in one ear there's an ongoing strain of self-aggrandizement (though I seem to be partially deaf in that ear) and in the other, a strain of the worst Inner Critic-speak you can imagine.

I probably should not have been by myself as much as I was this weekend. It's a two-edged sword: I really need to be alone and quiet to recharge (I think some of the stressed-out-ness of last week was that I didn't really get much "alone time" all weekend long). But on the other hand, if something's weighing on my mind, it's like a hamster in a wheel, I can't stop thinking about it.

And there are no good cartoons on right now. I find that cartoons are the best thing at distracting me from the hamster-wheel-inner-critic.

I think also it's that it's just been such a long hard slog this semester, I'm really tired and worn out and I don't bounce back from stuff as fast when I'm tired. And it's been too long since I spent time with family. As much as I love my colleagues (well, most of 'em) and the people I go to church with, they don't understand me the way my relatives do.

I know, I know: just over a week until I'm off for Thanksgiving. But that feels kind of like forever right now.

***

In happier news, I did finish one thing this weekend, the Maine Morning Mitts for the family friend.

This means all the mitt-gifts that I need to carry up to my parents' house are safely done. (The friend lives in Ohio, but this means I can wrap my gift and pop it in the box with my mom's gift. They're light enough that I doubt they would cost very much more in postage...)

This is a super-fast gift; I think you could probably knit a pair in a day if you had nothing else you had to be doing.