Week One: Dry Heaves

I am troubled by how these first few days of school have felt for me, at 26, exactly like the first days of kindergarten, and middle school, and high school, and college: namely, dreadful. Somehow situations like this, a gathering of like-minded people, with aspirations similar to my own, expose to me the worst aspects of my character: my cattiness, my insecurity, my wish to be distant from and better than others, my fears that I am a fraud. This welling of my meannesses usually subsides after a few weeks, if that, as I get to know my colleagues and they become friends and collaborators rather than a mob of rivals ready to outshine me (the enemy phalanx), so I’m not worried about my ability to work and learn with them this year. Yet to articulate to myself for the first time the possible reasons for wanting to crawl into a hole whenever I start at a new school, or indeed, any new activity involving strange people, was striking for the clarity it gave me on what seems a near-comprehensive array of my character defects. The competitiveness that has no part in helping one grow as an artist, and begets the wish to crawl into a hole rather than learn and benefit from the strengths of others—the competitiveness that won’t even see strengths in others! I fear several years of working (and, mostly, attempting to work) professionally have made me quick to judge others, or specifically to gauge just how much of a threat they are to me in my attempts to get work. This can’t be at all helpful in a learning environment, and was, I suspect, a waste of energy in the professional arena as well. I wonder how much I could learn, undisturbed by concerns of how “good” I am or ever get to be, or especially, whether I will ever be recognized as such.


The drive to be “better than” spooks easily, and out of cowardice settles for being merely “different from,” but can’t sleep for fear that it is a short slide to “undistinguished.”