These posts are becoming increasingly personal lately, but I guess I am okay with that for now. The thing on my mind today is that in my life (and I think this is probably true for lots of people), I have felt a pressure to be amazing in certain things. The reason I think for this comes from a lot of places perfectionism being one of them, but what has come to mind today is new. It is in two parts. The first is that being amazing is a way of dodging anxiety of judgement, and the second is that an un-ending striving for evidence of competence can be a sign of an internal question about gifting and belonging.
So we will start with the first one. There is a particular anxiety that I experience as it relates to performance. Afterwards, I wonder if people think I have done a bad job. This is probably related to how judgmental I have been of people in the past. So my solution to the anxiety is not to judge the quality of what I have done myself. I renounce that work in favor of being amazing. If I amaze enough people and get enough compliments then I can rest knowing that I don’t have to worry about what people are thinking. I will know what they are thinking more or less and that then ends the anxiety.
This has some problems though. The main one being that it is impossible to always amaze people and that compliments are not always trustworthy. So it is not a real solution to the anxiety. However, there is another problem though that is worse. Being overly concerned with people’s approval can at its worst result in not caring if what you are saying is true or not. This is very dangerous because under this motivaiton of pleasing others you can feel like a success whether or not you are teaching lies. That is a big problem.
It would be better and more effective to come up with a way of deciding for myself if I have done well or not. Other people would be part of this, but shouldn’t be a slave to people’s reactions and often their immediate reactions.
So now for the second part. I have discovered that with many things that I do I find myself trying to reach a level of expertise that will finally prove to myself that I belong in a certain role. This creates a frantic sense of constant preparation and never being good enough. Today though I have been thinking that actually it is not premature to acknowledge that I have certain gifts and belong in a certain role at least for the time being. I definitly can improve, but I don’t think I should worry anymore about whether or not I should be doing what I am doing.
This is a pretty big revelation for me. And I am realizing more and more how many of the things I have done recently and possibly life plans I have had relate to the question of expertise as belonging. I think this is one of the reasons that I have been wondering about grad school. I want to belong in the world of ideas. Now I am feeling some what sheepishly that in fact I do belong in the world of ideas. Maybe I am more the guy that slovels poop in the world of ideas than its king, but I think that I can at least say I belong. I wonder how easy it will be to keep hold of this understanding of my place.
I think that there is likely an interesting conversation to have on this idea of expertise and belonging as it relates to identity. I would like to think about this more. We often talk about finding our identity with God and Christ. However, this language does not always leave room in the world of action and expertise. Identity is just as at work there though.