Not feeling my best lately.
Apr. 3rd, 2026 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptI have been on a not-very-great headspace kick lately, and I think some of it has to do with things that are out of my control and that I cannot influence in any way to make the lives of the people around me better. Some of it is feeling foolish and unintelligent that the solutions to puzzles I am trying to work out don't immediately leap out at me and allow me to progress even further along, as other people are doing just fine.
And some of it, in this case, is feeling like I am being misunderstood, or that I am misunderstanding, and that those kinds of things are waking up the slumbering brainweasel that is cousin to "you are an impostor" but instead takes the tack of "you are actually bad at all of this, and you have been clinging to self-delusion that you are anything other than bad at everything."
This is a weasel that is impervious to counterexample and abundance of evidence. Mostly because of the experience I had with my first work supervisor, and how really awful the relationship with my ex turned out to be (and how long I stayed in it and tried to defend it or at least believe that it wasn't really that bad.) You know, the usual things that leave scars as they heal and always threaten to just open up again and start bleeding everywhere if they get poked.
The triggering point for this was one thing a coworker said to me, and it's related to other things, and I think it suggests there's a communication issue somewhere in the chain, but I can't tell if the issue is me, and that I'm not communicating clearly enough/often enough/well enough, or that I'm doing my damnedest and other people's interpretation of what's going on is souring the situation, despite my best efforts.
As you know, hypothetical audience, I work in libraries, and some of my duties include planning programming as well as putting it on. As part of the massive shifts my place of work is undergoing, there have been additional categories of programming assigned to all of my cohort-mates, such that I'm not responsible for several new pieces of programming that I wasn't before, and on a frequency that will exhaust available materials and inspiration quickly.
Aside from the manager who was going to fire me for reasons that can now be adequately explained as variable attention stimulus trait, at the start of the school year, I rotated to a different location as my satellite location, to provide programming, collection management, the whole set of things that my organization says that librarians are supposed to provide, with assistance from other people at that location.
The location manager usurped my collection management responsibilities, and then presented it to me as a fait accompli, and that it had already been worked out with the people above me that this would happen. I was rather confused about what had happened and why, and apparently the reasoning given to me was because I had, in the opinion of the location manager, over-weeded a collection, and someone above her made comment about the sparseness of the collection, and so I wasn't going to get to manage any of my collections while I was assigned to this location. This had already gone through all the right people and received approvals, but when I talked more about it and feeling like I had been hit from behind, I never got a clear answer about whether the location manager had claimed I had already been talked to and agreed to it or not, but in the interests of trying to maintain a harmonious relationship with the people that I would have to work with for the school year, I let it happen, rather than making enemies with someone right at the outset. (In my professional opinion, all the shelves are now overstuffed, but since someone else took that responsibility to themselves, she can take any blame that comes from mismanaging it as well.)
Then my organization decided they were going to reorganize everything, and the consequence of that action so far is that the person who would be handling significant amounts of the regular programming at this satellite location will eventually be barred from doing the programming, because they are being forcibly demoted into a role with no programming responsibilities. To try and ease the transition between presenters of story time, I asked the person currently in the role if she would walk me through what a typical story time looked like. I did get an outline of it, which was helpful, but according to the rumor mill presented by another co-worker, this prompted comments about this person not being interested in training me on how to do my own job. I thought I had adequately communicated that this ask was for smoothness of transition and trying to keep elements that would be familiar to the audiences as we did the change of people, but I guess not, if the rumors are true. (That situation has since been resolved in a much better form, and summer will be the actual transition point between people, with a good amount of time between the end of one session and the beginning of the next, so that it's not as sudden a swap.)
As part of the new requirements, there are some literacy programs that are now part fo my core requirements, and like everything else, while there have been some examples of what those programs could look like, the thing that matters is that they happen with the right kind of frequency. Many of those examples of what a non-facilitated program look like make me go, "No, people come to the library after they have been in school, not as an extension of it." So, as I am trying to think up something, I asked a co-worker if they had specific places they went to for ideas about programs, and didn't get back much of anything for it.
The phrase that tweaked me, and sent me on this pathway, though, was "Sorry you have to do your job," which makes me think that somehow, asking someone else about the places they frequent for finding material to make programs with was interpreted as a request for someone to do the work of creating the program and then handing it to me as a completed product just to create. And perhaps the request about how the program form goes earlier was interpreted in the same way, as asking for completed things and for the work to be done for me by others. It's not what I intended, but that seems to available logical explanation.
I couldn't articulate in the moment that this was not a request for someone to do things for me, but instead to share any good places they've found materials or patterns they've learned are effective at unearthing the stuff that can then become programming. And I didn't articulate in the moment that I thought that librarianship is supposed to be a profession that's about sharing our knowledge and information with others and helping them find the things they're looking for, not for guarding your things as if it were a hoard and refusing to share with others. I'm looking for the possibility that I don't have to reinvent the wheel, because the work has already been done and therefore the products can be shared and adapted, rather than requiring duplicated effort.
I have since poked around and found something that worked for an idea that I have and put together something that can be used as a program, even if I think it's pretty jank. It's not that I'm unwilling to do the work, it's that I don't like doing unnecessary work if the thing is already known and exists. But I must be coming across as asking other people to do more work for me rather than point me in the direction of places where I can build from raw materials, or where I can figure out what things to keep for continuity's sake and which things I might change.
("It has to be my fault," says the neurodivergent person with a suitcase full of negative emotional experiences where people did put the blame on them, "because if I could only communicate better and more properly, then there wouldn't be any problem with this. If only, you know, I could achieve 101% perfection, then everything would be fine, because there would be nothing to complain about, and therefore nothing that could be used to hurt me." There is no consideration of the possibility that it might be someone else's issue, because the only consistent thing in any particular set of problems is me, therefore the problem is always me. After all, I'm the one with the neurodivergence. Hi, I'm the problem, it's me, and I find it difficult to accept the possibility that there isn't some way to achieve the Platonic form or the perfect message or otherwise craft a communication in such a way that it can't be misinterpreted without some very intentional and obvious choices to do so.)
It's also one of those truisms, I think, that nobody really believes they're bad at their job, or they would be doing something else. But the way that my past with managers and organizations and rumors and all the rest keeps telling me is that my judgment about whether I am bad at my job is not to be trusted, because an accurate representation would have been able to foresee the poaching of my collection management responsibilities, or to realize that asking for this thing would look like I'm trying to offload work onto others that I should be doing. Or it would have seen that the things that seemed like small mistakes were actually large ones and been able to find some plan of stopping mistakes entirely.
(My judgment about how good or bad I am at everything is not to be trusted, because skill-taste gaps, because others have different opinions on it, because I keep finding new opportunities to learn more and refine my mental models by making mistakes, and because the judgment of good and bad often relies on other people and their tastes and sensibilities, which are more important than mine, because they're not me and my clearly deficient system. Yes, I'm comparing my insides to other people's outsides.)
The system of figuring out positives and negatives also is set up in such a way that I have to do a lot of inferring on my own. Big program numbers are probably a good sign. The grownups telling me that they liked the program and their little ones had fun is probably a good sign. The occasional bits and pieces of levity and those precious few pieces of written feedback are probably good signs. That my responsibilities were poached is a bad sign. That the explanation seems to have been based in a single incident is a confusing sign. That I'm getting negative feedback from requests I thought I had crafted sufficiently carefully is a bad sign. That most things seem to be going fine should probably be seen as a good sign, but when the really bad things started happening, I thought things seemed to be going fine, or at least that we had communicated properly about how to improve on some of the things that weren't going fine.
My experiences have led me not to the confidence of the mediocre white man, who can explain away any fault as being someone else's problem, or not actually relevant to them, but instead to the pathways of someone who carries themself like they expect to be hit at some point, and probably without any warning signs they can detect. I'm trying to be good at my job, but being good at my job involves other people, and people are notoriously hard to read properly.
I dunno. Maybe I am bad at my job. (Peter says, after all, that we are promoted to the level of our incompetence, so maybe I've already found mine.)
Maybe I'm bad at relationships. (This is an unknowable item without outside perspectives, and those outside perspectives each have their own criteria for figuring out whether I'm good or bad at it, rather than a single "objective" standard.)
Maybe I'm bad at everything. (That's not true, but it can certainly feel that way if you go too long without something giving you a trout-slap or managing to break through with enough feelings of competence to get above the anhedonia line.)
Guess I'll go eat worms? (But there aren't any gummy worms in the house right now, and also, it's well-past time I was in bed at the time of finishing this entry. Post time on this is after I've had a night's sleep, but this feeling of general incompetence persists even across sleep.)
And some of it, in this case, is feeling like I am being misunderstood, or that I am misunderstanding, and that those kinds of things are waking up the slumbering brainweasel that is cousin to "you are an impostor" but instead takes the tack of "you are actually bad at all of this, and you have been clinging to self-delusion that you are anything other than bad at everything."
This is a weasel that is impervious to counterexample and abundance of evidence. Mostly because of the experience I had with my first work supervisor, and how really awful the relationship with my ex turned out to be (and how long I stayed in it and tried to defend it or at least believe that it wasn't really that bad.) You know, the usual things that leave scars as they heal and always threaten to just open up again and start bleeding everywhere if they get poked.
The triggering point for this was one thing a coworker said to me, and it's related to other things, and I think it suggests there's a communication issue somewhere in the chain, but I can't tell if the issue is me, and that I'm not communicating clearly enough/often enough/well enough, or that I'm doing my damnedest and other people's interpretation of what's going on is souring the situation, despite my best efforts.
As you know, hypothetical audience, I work in libraries, and some of my duties include planning programming as well as putting it on. As part of the massive shifts my place of work is undergoing, there have been additional categories of programming assigned to all of my cohort-mates, such that I'm not responsible for several new pieces of programming that I wasn't before, and on a frequency that will exhaust available materials and inspiration quickly.
Aside from the manager who was going to fire me for reasons that can now be adequately explained as variable attention stimulus trait, at the start of the school year, I rotated to a different location as my satellite location, to provide programming, collection management, the whole set of things that my organization says that librarians are supposed to provide, with assistance from other people at that location.
The location manager usurped my collection management responsibilities, and then presented it to me as a fait accompli, and that it had already been worked out with the people above me that this would happen. I was rather confused about what had happened and why, and apparently the reasoning given to me was because I had, in the opinion of the location manager, over-weeded a collection, and someone above her made comment about the sparseness of the collection, and so I wasn't going to get to manage any of my collections while I was assigned to this location. This had already gone through all the right people and received approvals, but when I talked more about it and feeling like I had been hit from behind, I never got a clear answer about whether the location manager had claimed I had already been talked to and agreed to it or not, but in the interests of trying to maintain a harmonious relationship with the people that I would have to work with for the school year, I let it happen, rather than making enemies with someone right at the outset. (In my professional opinion, all the shelves are now overstuffed, but since someone else took that responsibility to themselves, she can take any blame that comes from mismanaging it as well.)
Then my organization decided they were going to reorganize everything, and the consequence of that action so far is that the person who would be handling significant amounts of the regular programming at this satellite location will eventually be barred from doing the programming, because they are being forcibly demoted into a role with no programming responsibilities. To try and ease the transition between presenters of story time, I asked the person currently in the role if she would walk me through what a typical story time looked like. I did get an outline of it, which was helpful, but according to the rumor mill presented by another co-worker, this prompted comments about this person not being interested in training me on how to do my own job. I thought I had adequately communicated that this ask was for smoothness of transition and trying to keep elements that would be familiar to the audiences as we did the change of people, but I guess not, if the rumors are true. (That situation has since been resolved in a much better form, and summer will be the actual transition point between people, with a good amount of time between the end of one session and the beginning of the next, so that it's not as sudden a swap.)
As part of the new requirements, there are some literacy programs that are now part fo my core requirements, and like everything else, while there have been some examples of what those programs could look like, the thing that matters is that they happen with the right kind of frequency. Many of those examples of what a non-facilitated program look like make me go, "No, people come to the library after they have been in school, not as an extension of it." So, as I am trying to think up something, I asked a co-worker if they had specific places they went to for ideas about programs, and didn't get back much of anything for it.
The phrase that tweaked me, and sent me on this pathway, though, was "Sorry you have to do your job," which makes me think that somehow, asking someone else about the places they frequent for finding material to make programs with was interpreted as a request for someone to do the work of creating the program and then handing it to me as a completed product just to create. And perhaps the request about how the program form goes earlier was interpreted in the same way, as asking for completed things and for the work to be done for me by others. It's not what I intended, but that seems to available logical explanation.
I couldn't articulate in the moment that this was not a request for someone to do things for me, but instead to share any good places they've found materials or patterns they've learned are effective at unearthing the stuff that can then become programming. And I didn't articulate in the moment that I thought that librarianship is supposed to be a profession that's about sharing our knowledge and information with others and helping them find the things they're looking for, not for guarding your things as if it were a hoard and refusing to share with others. I'm looking for the possibility that I don't have to reinvent the wheel, because the work has already been done and therefore the products can be shared and adapted, rather than requiring duplicated effort.
I have since poked around and found something that worked for an idea that I have and put together something that can be used as a program, even if I think it's pretty jank. It's not that I'm unwilling to do the work, it's that I don't like doing unnecessary work if the thing is already known and exists. But I must be coming across as asking other people to do more work for me rather than point me in the direction of places where I can build from raw materials, or where I can figure out what things to keep for continuity's sake and which things I might change.
("It has to be my fault," says the neurodivergent person with a suitcase full of negative emotional experiences where people did put the blame on them, "because if I could only communicate better and more properly, then there wouldn't be any problem with this. If only, you know, I could achieve 101% perfection, then everything would be fine, because there would be nothing to complain about, and therefore nothing that could be used to hurt me." There is no consideration of the possibility that it might be someone else's issue, because the only consistent thing in any particular set of problems is me, therefore the problem is always me. After all, I'm the one with the neurodivergence. Hi, I'm the problem, it's me, and I find it difficult to accept the possibility that there isn't some way to achieve the Platonic form or the perfect message or otherwise craft a communication in such a way that it can't be misinterpreted without some very intentional and obvious choices to do so.)
It's also one of those truisms, I think, that nobody really believes they're bad at their job, or they would be doing something else. But the way that my past with managers and organizations and rumors and all the rest keeps telling me is that my judgment about whether I am bad at my job is not to be trusted, because an accurate representation would have been able to foresee the poaching of my collection management responsibilities, or to realize that asking for this thing would look like I'm trying to offload work onto others that I should be doing. Or it would have seen that the things that seemed like small mistakes were actually large ones and been able to find some plan of stopping mistakes entirely.
(My judgment about how good or bad I am at everything is not to be trusted, because skill-taste gaps, because others have different opinions on it, because I keep finding new opportunities to learn more and refine my mental models by making mistakes, and because the judgment of good and bad often relies on other people and their tastes and sensibilities, which are more important than mine, because they're not me and my clearly deficient system. Yes, I'm comparing my insides to other people's outsides.)
The system of figuring out positives and negatives also is set up in such a way that I have to do a lot of inferring on my own. Big program numbers are probably a good sign. The grownups telling me that they liked the program and their little ones had fun is probably a good sign. The occasional bits and pieces of levity and those precious few pieces of written feedback are probably good signs. That my responsibilities were poached is a bad sign. That the explanation seems to have been based in a single incident is a confusing sign. That I'm getting negative feedback from requests I thought I had crafted sufficiently carefully is a bad sign. That most things seem to be going fine should probably be seen as a good sign, but when the really bad things started happening, I thought things seemed to be going fine, or at least that we had communicated properly about how to improve on some of the things that weren't going fine.
My experiences have led me not to the confidence of the mediocre white man, who can explain away any fault as being someone else's problem, or not actually relevant to them, but instead to the pathways of someone who carries themself like they expect to be hit at some point, and probably without any warning signs they can detect. I'm trying to be good at my job, but being good at my job involves other people, and people are notoriously hard to read properly.
I dunno. Maybe I am bad at my job. (Peter says, after all, that we are promoted to the level of our incompetence, so maybe I've already found mine.)
Maybe I'm bad at relationships. (This is an unknowable item without outside perspectives, and those outside perspectives each have their own criteria for figuring out whether I'm good or bad at it, rather than a single "objective" standard.)
Maybe I'm bad at everything. (That's not true, but it can certainly feel that way if you go too long without something giving you a trout-slap or managing to break through with enough feelings of competence to get above the anhedonia line.)
Guess I'll go eat worms? (But there aren't any gummy worms in the house right now, and also, it's well-past time I was in bed at the time of finishing this entry. Post time on this is after I've had a night's sleep, but this feeling of general incompetence persists even across sleep.)
no subject
Date: 2026-04-03 05:34 pm (UTC)My relationship with my boss has completely changed (for the better) since I started zoloft, which I find quite amusing. I knew I had a mild case of depression for some time, apparently it got a lot worse in recent years and I didn't realize it.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-04 04:16 pm (UTC)