embarrassing little confession

In some locales (the UK, I guess, and Australia), it is "honorary degree" season. (John Cleese was awarded one)

This is a thing. Some Famous Person gets invited to a university, they usually speak at graduation, and then they are awarded an honorary doctorate. (Usually in Humane Letters or some such, at least on this side of the Pond).

And here's my embarrassing confession: I feel slightly sad that I will never do anything in my life that will ever lead to me being considered for an honorary degree anywhere.

("First world problems, line one!")

And yes, I know, I know: they're pretty meaningless really, some pretty awful people have wound up getting them in the past (but then again some pretty wonderful people have: Dolly Parton was awarded one).

And yes, I know, I know: I earned a doctorate the hard way myself, spent five years wrestling with data and my last summer there calling in every favor I had done, promising field help in kind, offering to cook dinners for people, batting my eyes at the gentlemen among my fellow grad students, and generally doing whatever I could to recruit field hands to help me with the fieldwork that a Certain Person on my committee had thought "might be a good idea to do" (translation: "I'm not signing off on the thing unless she does it.")

though actually that was a pretty good summer and really was one of the high points of my life when I reflect back.

And I went through all the writing. And the margin checks (dear Celestia, the margin checks). And scheduled the defense and nearly had to re-schedule it when my external member thought he'd have to bail. And successfully defended the thing, went through graduation, got hooded, got the dissertation bound, finally managed to convert it into a publication some seven years later, but....

for some reason I look at an honorary degree and think, "that. That would be evidence to me that I'm somehow good enough, that other people thought what I did mattered."

of course, until I thought of the next thing.

But yeah. One of my shameful personal not-so-secrets is that I tend to seek approval from outside sources. I've never been good at saying "Dang, I'm good," I feel like I need to hear it from someone else. I don't know if that's because I saw too many people exhibiting the Dunning-Kruger Effect (long before I ever knew what that was) or what, but....yeah. Craving for some kind of outside validation. Of course that's an awful way to live because rarely do you ever really get the validation you want.

(And also part of this is frustration that a lot of the things I am good at are things that are not "valuable" in the sense that the world assigns value, and so I look for being valued where I can.)