Ugh, Impostor Syndroms

This is something lots of people in academia know about - you wind up surrounded by smart people good at what they do and you begin to wonder if your own success was entirely a fluke. And then you worry that people will find out you're not as good as they thought you were.

Anyway.

Not to be too spoilerish about the Season Six MLP premiere, but we see Sunburst (the friend of Starlight Glimmer whose early ascension to a "talented" state helped to turn her bitter and make her hate cutie marks). Well, Sunburst is not a Big Important Wizard as everyone assumed....apparently he failed out of wizard school? Or at least failed to do much with what he had learned? Anyway, he lived in the Crystal Empire (a tiny plot device to give even more of a reason for Twilight to drag Starlight Glimmer along with her - Twilight wanted to make Starlight make amends with her old friend - shades of the Moondancer episode).

Anyway, Sunburst lives hidden away in a book-filled house. (Seriously, I think a higher proportion of Ponies are completely book-mad than you see in human populations, perhaps another reason why Equestria is better than the real world). He reads about magic but doesn't believe he can do much of it. (Though he does wind up helping to save the day at the end. Not on his own, but he helps).

And yeah. The whole idea of "you were told early on you had such promise and what did you do with it" thing was kind of straight in the feels for me, because my entire career I've battled, off and on, feelings that I had more promise but I was either too lazy, or too devoted to my life outside work, or not as smart as people thought I was, or too timid, or something, and so I failed those early expectations.

I'm struggling with it a bit today. In a few weeks our annual program of "let's tell others about our research interests" talks rolls around and I volunteered to do one this year, partly because I am up for Post Tenure Review this fall and I need more diverse ways of engagement/more presentations. It's going to be over soil invertebrates: a general overview of why they're important, some gee-whiz stuff about different groups (there are lots of cool things about soil invertebrates, or at least I think they're cool, like book-scorpions for example), and a little bit about how and why you should encourage them in your lawn and garden.

And I work away on it for a while and then I hit a wall. Because the other talks in other years have been about cool places people went, or big exciting things they did. And I tell myself:

a. This talk is too dry. Everyone's going to be bored
b. No one will care about soil invertebrates

And I think about how I'll look like a fool for having given the talk, like, "Why did she think she had anything people wanted to listen to" so I don't know.

I'm not good at doing explosions-and-dancing-ducks kinds of talks, because honestly? I hate those kinds of talks where the person is going at it like a used-car salesman (and I have occasionally sat through a talk like that and it seems like some people eat it up, and I'm sitting  there going, "But there's no THERE there, this person is just doing fancy patter"). But I also fear that I'm too dull of a person to give the kind of talk that goes over well at these things. I do have a few of my own, personal microscope-cam photos of stuff in the talk, but also a lot of photos taken (with permission) from research websites, where those photos put mine to shame.

I don't know. I'm trying not to psych myself into having performance anxiety because then it WILL be a bad talk but....I don't know. Maybe I was an idiot to think people would care about this topic. (If I were talking to a science class of 8 or 10 year olds, it might go over better - lots of kids that age, especially the kind interested in science, go crazy over anything to do with bugs.)

I dunno. Also another thing about these furlough days I realized: they're telling us, "Don't work these days" but the whole budget situation makes people like me more nervous about our jobs (and therefore, want to do things that make us seem less expendable or, in the worst option, position us well to go back out on the job market) and that means doing MORE work. It's just a depressing situation.