Polar vortex? Alberta Clipper? It’s been cold in Cook County this month. I’m delighted that we have a high of 32F for today, when earlier this week we were comfortably back in negative double digits and dangerous wind chills. The difference between this round of terrible temperatures and the last one is that I’m not hiding in my apartment as much. I’m pretty sure I have this XKCD comic to thank for that, along with a memory of an elementary school friend who’d grown up in Edmonton, Alberta, gleefully bragging about Halloween in weather like this.
I’m sure you’ll have noticed that this weekly check-in is not occurring on a Monday, and especially not this past Monday. I fell into a couple of traps on this front, mostly having to do with believing I had nothing to say. January is a really easy month to want to hide and hibernate through, especially when you feel like everyone else has their act together but you. But the thing about hibernation, to get all Advice Columnist-y on us, is that often you’re doing a lot of work that you don’t necessarily see, but that comes to mean a lot when you get going on something else. (As an aside, this week I learned that Andrew W.K. is actually an excellent advice columnist. Who knew?)
Part of that work, for me, has been reframing the way this job hunting thing works. A trio of “Surprise! You really need to hear this” encounters — one from Medill Career Services, one from a former professor over Facebook and one from a cousin at a funeral, of all things — has finally knocked it into my head that “Please, sir, may have I another?” is truly not going to get me far. Some people need to be able to back up their swagger with performance; I need to translate my skills and accomplishments into swagger. (Hi, potential employers who might be reading this! I hope by the time you see this, we’ve gotten to know each other well enough that you’re surprised that I’m in knots about this whole process.)
Another thing that smacked me over the head was a fortuitous trio of links about understanding what goes on in your head when you avoid doing something that you really want to do, like work and earn money.
- Procrastination Is Not Laziness: “It’s a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth.” Everybody loves thinking of themselves as neurotic, but yeah, in general, this hits home.
- Why We Procrastinate: “It turns out that we see our future selves as strangers.” The lede on this is ghastly, but the rest is pretty sound.
- Everyone Has Impostor Syndrome Except for You: Just as I always feared!
Luckily the UNC Writing Center has our backs with steps and solutions we can use for real. Another tactic, which I undertook yesterday, is to give yourself an actual break, not just one where you hate yourself for getting off track about your real job, and do something that fills you up, rather than just kills time. I spent the day meeting up with friends, wandering the Art Institute of Chicago and seeing a movie about a 14-year-old who sails around the world. Continue reading “The Frozen North is not done with us yet”
Magpie & Whale 