![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#21: "My Big Successes Are Luck-Based."
This may seem familiar to some of you. It's a companion piece to an earlier entry in the series, and it helps twist it even worse than it had been before. Because, you see, when I start talking about how everything is my fault, it's not a balanced fault. I don't claim credit for the good things that happen that I could attribute to myself, but I will accept and blame myself for the bad things that happened in my life.
This is another one of those situations where when I look up information about the thought patterns that I've put into myself, the articles and posts and things say "This happens a lot more to people who were socialized as women." Which is not saying that it's impossible for people who were socialized as men, but it's apparently not as common. For people who are socialized as women, the pressure to downplay your own achievements starts early and stays relatively high all throughout your life, because it is apparently sacreligious and sinful if a woman should prove herself more competent than any man around her, even when she definitely is more competent than at least some of the men around her. I didn't get the "stop showing off, women are supposed to be demure" version. Instead, I got the "stop showing off, you're making the rest of us look bad" version, I guess. Or whatever the version of that is that essentially opens the door to being made fun of when, as humans and human children do, you make a mistake. And it's the being made fun of not because of the mistake itself, but because "the smart kid made a mistake." I guess I was still projecting that arrogant attitude or something. Just because something is easy for me doesn't mean it's easy for everyone, I recognize that, but I don't have a good enough memory of the times in question to know whether younger me also recognized this. It might have been that younger me wanted everyone else to get up toward their level, or, barring that, to take an interest in their studies and at least try to learn things? Which many of them did, but you, the reading audience, probably have a decent idea of how much one person who wants to derail things can in a setting such as a classroom, without ever doing anything that will get them into any kind of disciplinary situation. I certainly believe that by high school, I was just ready to get out and move on to the next part of my schooilng, and that only got more so as I went on, having decided that the culture of the place was sufficiently No that I didn't want to engage with it all that much anymore.
Anyway, from at least elementary school, and all the way through high school, I was getting the message reinforced pretty regularly that it is…"cringe" actually might be the right word for it, even though that particular use of the word comes into existence much, much later, to want to suceed, to have earnest interests, and to stand out and use what you've got to the greatest ability that you have. I was advised by the grownups in my life that the negative attention I was getting from being earnest and trying to succeed was "jealousy" and that it should be ignored. This "Ignore the haters and don't feed the trolls" attitude works for you so long as you are in full control of the situation, which is to say, almost never. As soon as there are other people who are involved in the situation, and they can influence the situation at least as much as you can, they have to be dealt with. And while I did my best to reduce the amount of influence other people could have on me, I couldn't get rid of it entirely. After all, grading requires teachers and multiplayer requires other players. And group projects are the kinds of things where everyone theoretically has to contribute, regardless of their interest level in the project or in the grade. So there's always at least some part of success or failure that's outside of my control, regardless of how much talent, experience, or brains I'm bringing to the situation.
Both of those messages make for a terrible intersection. If there's always some amount of the situation that's out of your control, and there's always someone or something waiting to drag you for your failures or to proclaim that you're being arrogant if you own your successes (whether that person is real or perceived), then the way that you survive any situation is by being willing to own your faults (and to blame yourself hard enough that the critic decides they're not interested in making fun of you or piling on) and to be willing to discount your successes (so that the critic doesn't get the idea in their head that you're being full of yourself and need to be taken down a peg.)
Once you leave the confines of the university and the school, it's all group projects. So you have to be able to work with peers and with managers and bosses and figure out the dynamics of the office's politics and what's expected of you and your role and where, if anywhere, you're expected to have expertise and to be confident and where you're expected to defer and otherwise let someone else make the decisions. In some of those situations, it's also an expected part of the culture that the manager gets to claim all the successes and pass off all the failures to a subordinate, who then has to accept the blame. Some situations and bosses expect their subordinates to ask permission to sneeze and hold it if it isn't given. Some operate on ask culture, and others on guess culture. And so, so many of them, especially in the profession that I chose, work on the assumption that you are well-versed and fluent in white culture and white ways of doing things, regardless of whether you were raised white or not. When someone is talking about "culture fit," it almost always means "Does this person have the tacit knowledge that we require in this space for harmonious relationships and for smooth operations?" When that gets discussed, it really doesn't matter what kind of expertise or skills the person is bringing to the table, it's whether they're going to get along with the people who are already there. And the more things that a candidate has that marks them as "different" from what the culture already is, the more likely they're not going to "fit" the culture, and that's going to create friction. Which is going to be blamed on the person that's not fitting, because, after all, everyone else understands how it's supposed to work. "Why can't you just be normal?" they ask when there's a "fit" mismatch, never thinking that perhaps the culture is wrong instead of the person who is different, or that the person could fit into the culture and the workflow very well if they had some accommodations, or if someone can figure out how things work for them and integrate that into the regular workflow.
It's also a bitter irony when you're in a place where you are expected to provide high-quality service as a regular part of your duties, not to call attention to it when it goes well, and then you get asked as part of your self-evaluation to provide examples where things have gone well that you were part of / responsibe for. And you still have to do this, even though you know that even with an accomplishments list a mile long, you're still expected to check the box that says "meets expectations" and expect in return that you will receive "meets expectations," because "exceeds expectations" is a special category that should only appear in the most rare of situations, and that the person who will be making that designation is your supervisor, not you, because while you could check that box on your own self-evaluation, it is tacitly understood to be arrogant to suggest that you might be doing something more than "meeting expectations." (I try to send official recognition when my co-workers do things that deserve recognition, so they have something to put on their own evaluations as to where they did things well, and possibly some evidence to back up that they're also exceeding expectations.)
And, you know, with the additional difficulties of having a manager that doesn't know how to help you succeed, and at least some part (if not a lot of parts) of working in a place that not only encourages gossip, but has people who actively dislike you and try to get you into trouble for anything they can get their hands on, and also having a relationship at home that was not nuturing to my feeling of competence, with a partner that was masterful at the art of making sure that I knew how much all of my problems were my problems. Like my "need" to win to have fun, or my inability to tell her a no she would respect / my willingness to tell her no so much, my need to go off on all these "tangents" when she wanted to discuss something instead of sticking to the specific situation at hand and evaluating it only on the merits of that specific situation, context be damned. And several other things that I'm forgetting right now, and it's probably good that I am.
You can see the pattern by this point: Things that go wrong are my fault, things that go well are not attributable to what I did, but instead because someone else didn't decide to shit all over it, or because I had a run of good luck where the things that were out of my control lined up for me. Because it would be arrogant to believe that I was responsible for the good results that happened to me. I might believe I had some kind of worth, or skill, or expertise, and that it was worthwhile to have that acknowledged. Or, conversely, to have something acknolweged as a thing that I did well despite adversarial conditions, rather than having it be "business as usual," completely unremarkable, just another situation of "meeting expectations." It might be foolish to believe that other people will recognize me for the good things that I do, and it is foolish for me to believe that the only things that count as recognition or good things are the ones that other people notice and comment upon unprompted. Which puts the onus on me to be the one who documents the good things that happen, including the ones that happen that I'm responsible for, and to be proud of them, even if nobody else is (or, as sometimes happens, other people look at the thing and go "I didn't follow that at all, but it sounds cool.") And then to marvel when people comment on them in a supportive way, rather than coming in with the knives to cut me down for daring to think I might have done something well.
Sometimes it really is lucky, or due to someone else's work, that something I did gets lots of kudos and comments (out of a couple hundred works, I have one that has more than 1,000 kudos. It's a fluke. But I did write it, and I still like it.) Or it's a collaborative effort that gets something done, and the credit really should be shared between all the people who helped make it happen. But then there are times where I manage to figure out that the reason a computer isn't updating itself is because it's had a bit flipped that tells the update process to fail (once I finally get a useful error message out of it, aigh.) and that once the bit gets flipped back, it works fine. That's pretty cool, and it's a success that's me. As is the subsequent success at decoding another deceptive error message and using my information professional powers to resolve that error message. And then the third necessary success in getting the machine to boot properly again after all of the previous hilarity because I hadn't followed a previous instruction exactly rightly, but I was able to figure out how to get back to a working environment and then run that command correctly. (And then the need to free up space to get something else to work...) After enough instances of success (including, for example, all of those delicious cooking successes), it becomes clear that it's not all luck that's contributing here.
So I might still be deferential about my own successes outside of my evaluation forms or when I'm trying to make a point. If I am, it's good practice and helpful at chasing away the brain weasels if you can get me to admit that my successes have at least as much to do with good preparation and/or skill as fortune or other people coming through in the clutch. After all, as you've seen so far, there are a lot of things that I don't believe fully any more, and a lot of them are things where it would be good for me not to believe them at all.
#21: "My Big Successes Are Luck-Based."
This may seem familiar to some of you. It's a companion piece to an earlier entry in the series, and it helps twist it even worse than it had been before. Because, you see, when I start talking about how everything is my fault, it's not a balanced fault. I don't claim credit for the good things that happen that I could attribute to myself, but I will accept and blame myself for the bad things that happened in my life.
This is another one of those situations where when I look up information about the thought patterns that I've put into myself, the articles and posts and things say "This happens a lot more to people who were socialized as women." Which is not saying that it's impossible for people who were socialized as men, but it's apparently not as common. For people who are socialized as women, the pressure to downplay your own achievements starts early and stays relatively high all throughout your life, because it is apparently sacreligious and sinful if a woman should prove herself more competent than any man around her, even when she definitely is more competent than at least some of the men around her. I didn't get the "stop showing off, women are supposed to be demure" version. Instead, I got the "stop showing off, you're making the rest of us look bad" version, I guess. Or whatever the version of that is that essentially opens the door to being made fun of when, as humans and human children do, you make a mistake. And it's the being made fun of not because of the mistake itself, but because "the smart kid made a mistake." I guess I was still projecting that arrogant attitude or something. Just because something is easy for me doesn't mean it's easy for everyone, I recognize that, but I don't have a good enough memory of the times in question to know whether younger me also recognized this. It might have been that younger me wanted everyone else to get up toward their level, or, barring that, to take an interest in their studies and at least try to learn things? Which many of them did, but you, the reading audience, probably have a decent idea of how much one person who wants to derail things can in a setting such as a classroom, without ever doing anything that will get them into any kind of disciplinary situation. I certainly believe that by high school, I was just ready to get out and move on to the next part of my schooilng, and that only got more so as I went on, having decided that the culture of the place was sufficiently No that I didn't want to engage with it all that much anymore.
Anyway, from at least elementary school, and all the way through high school, I was getting the message reinforced pretty regularly that it is…"cringe" actually might be the right word for it, even though that particular use of the word comes into existence much, much later, to want to suceed, to have earnest interests, and to stand out and use what you've got to the greatest ability that you have. I was advised by the grownups in my life that the negative attention I was getting from being earnest and trying to succeed was "jealousy" and that it should be ignored. This "Ignore the haters and don't feed the trolls" attitude works for you so long as you are in full control of the situation, which is to say, almost never. As soon as there are other people who are involved in the situation, and they can influence the situation at least as much as you can, they have to be dealt with. And while I did my best to reduce the amount of influence other people could have on me, I couldn't get rid of it entirely. After all, grading requires teachers and multiplayer requires other players. And group projects are the kinds of things where everyone theoretically has to contribute, regardless of their interest level in the project or in the grade. So there's always at least some part of success or failure that's outside of my control, regardless of how much talent, experience, or brains I'm bringing to the situation.
Both of those messages make for a terrible intersection. If there's always some amount of the situation that's out of your control, and there's always someone or something waiting to drag you for your failures or to proclaim that you're being arrogant if you own your successes (whether that person is real or perceived), then the way that you survive any situation is by being willing to own your faults (and to blame yourself hard enough that the critic decides they're not interested in making fun of you or piling on) and to be willing to discount your successes (so that the critic doesn't get the idea in their head that you're being full of yourself and need to be taken down a peg.)
Once you leave the confines of the university and the school, it's all group projects. So you have to be able to work with peers and with managers and bosses and figure out the dynamics of the office's politics and what's expected of you and your role and where, if anywhere, you're expected to have expertise and to be confident and where you're expected to defer and otherwise let someone else make the decisions. In some of those situations, it's also an expected part of the culture that the manager gets to claim all the successes and pass off all the failures to a subordinate, who then has to accept the blame. Some situations and bosses expect their subordinates to ask permission to sneeze and hold it if it isn't given. Some operate on ask culture, and others on guess culture. And so, so many of them, especially in the profession that I chose, work on the assumption that you are well-versed and fluent in white culture and white ways of doing things, regardless of whether you were raised white or not. When someone is talking about "culture fit," it almost always means "Does this person have the tacit knowledge that we require in this space for harmonious relationships and for smooth operations?" When that gets discussed, it really doesn't matter what kind of expertise or skills the person is bringing to the table, it's whether they're going to get along with the people who are already there. And the more things that a candidate has that marks them as "different" from what the culture already is, the more likely they're not going to "fit" the culture, and that's going to create friction. Which is going to be blamed on the person that's not fitting, because, after all, everyone else understands how it's supposed to work. "Why can't you just be normal?" they ask when there's a "fit" mismatch, never thinking that perhaps the culture is wrong instead of the person who is different, or that the person could fit into the culture and the workflow very well if they had some accommodations, or if someone can figure out how things work for them and integrate that into the regular workflow.
It's also a bitter irony when you're in a place where you are expected to provide high-quality service as a regular part of your duties, not to call attention to it when it goes well, and then you get asked as part of your self-evaluation to provide examples where things have gone well that you were part of / responsibe for. And you still have to do this, even though you know that even with an accomplishments list a mile long, you're still expected to check the box that says "meets expectations" and expect in return that you will receive "meets expectations," because "exceeds expectations" is a special category that should only appear in the most rare of situations, and that the person who will be making that designation is your supervisor, not you, because while you could check that box on your own self-evaluation, it is tacitly understood to be arrogant to suggest that you might be doing something more than "meeting expectations." (I try to send official recognition when my co-workers do things that deserve recognition, so they have something to put on their own evaluations as to where they did things well, and possibly some evidence to back up that they're also exceeding expectations.)
And, you know, with the additional difficulties of having a manager that doesn't know how to help you succeed, and at least some part (if not a lot of parts) of working in a place that not only encourages gossip, but has people who actively dislike you and try to get you into trouble for anything they can get their hands on, and also having a relationship at home that was not nuturing to my feeling of competence, with a partner that was masterful at the art of making sure that I knew how much all of my problems were my problems. Like my "need" to win to have fun, or my inability to tell her a no she would respect / my willingness to tell her no so much, my need to go off on all these "tangents" when she wanted to discuss something instead of sticking to the specific situation at hand and evaluating it only on the merits of that specific situation, context be damned. And several other things that I'm forgetting right now, and it's probably good that I am.
You can see the pattern by this point: Things that go wrong are my fault, things that go well are not attributable to what I did, but instead because someone else didn't decide to shit all over it, or because I had a run of good luck where the things that were out of my control lined up for me. Because it would be arrogant to believe that I was responsible for the good results that happened to me. I might believe I had some kind of worth, or skill, or expertise, and that it was worthwhile to have that acknowledged. Or, conversely, to have something acknolweged as a thing that I did well despite adversarial conditions, rather than having it be "business as usual," completely unremarkable, just another situation of "meeting expectations." It might be foolish to believe that other people will recognize me for the good things that I do, and it is foolish for me to believe that the only things that count as recognition or good things are the ones that other people notice and comment upon unprompted. Which puts the onus on me to be the one who documents the good things that happen, including the ones that happen that I'm responsible for, and to be proud of them, even if nobody else is (or, as sometimes happens, other people look at the thing and go "I didn't follow that at all, but it sounds cool.") And then to marvel when people comment on them in a supportive way, rather than coming in with the knives to cut me down for daring to think I might have done something well.
Sometimes it really is lucky, or due to someone else's work, that something I did gets lots of kudos and comments (out of a couple hundred works, I have one that has more than 1,000 kudos. It's a fluke. But I did write it, and I still like it.) Or it's a collaborative effort that gets something done, and the credit really should be shared between all the people who helped make it happen. But then there are times where I manage to figure out that the reason a computer isn't updating itself is because it's had a bit flipped that tells the update process to fail (once I finally get a useful error message out of it, aigh.) and that once the bit gets flipped back, it works fine. That's pretty cool, and it's a success that's me. As is the subsequent success at decoding another deceptive error message and using my information professional powers to resolve that error message. And then the third necessary success in getting the machine to boot properly again after all of the previous hilarity because I hadn't followed a previous instruction exactly rightly, but I was able to figure out how to get back to a working environment and then run that command correctly. (And then the need to free up space to get something else to work...) After enough instances of success (including, for example, all of those delicious cooking successes), it becomes clear that it's not all luck that's contributing here.
So I might still be deferential about my own successes outside of my evaluation forms or when I'm trying to make a point. If I am, it's good practice and helpful at chasing away the brain weasels if you can get me to admit that my successes have at least as much to do with good preparation and/or skill as fortune or other people coming through in the clutch. After all, as you've seen so far, there are a lot of things that I don't believe fully any more, and a lot of them are things where it would be good for me not to believe them at all.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-23 03:31 pm (UTC)This.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From: