Diving

Warning: this will probably come across as navel-gazing. Feel free to ignore the melodrama.

Over the holidays, Laureen and I got to travel with my brother, Jim, and his wife, Pam on a car trip to our northern brethren. It was the four of us in the car, and we were talking about life. Jim asked me why I was feeling down.

I replied that I’d felt this way since before Thanksgiving, and I didn’t know if it was seasonal or what. We then talked about the big change that he made when he moved to Texas. (We moved before my freshman year of high school, but Jim didn’t come to Texas until one year later. This was because our mom moved from one high school to another right before her senior year, and I think in some small way she wanted Jim to have that continuity.) He stated that he made a conscious choice when he came to Texas; it was a fresh start. No one knew him, no one knew his past, no one really had a preconceived notion of him, so he basically picked up the ball and ran with it.

I envied his ability to make that choice, because there are so many times in my life where I feel like I have to present myself as what I’ve always been: the smart one, the guy who knows stuff about stuff. You want to see me go crazy? Ask me an answerable question, then take away my ability to use google and Wikipedia. Inevitably, I’ve always felt like I had to be right, because being right was the only way to not hear the calls of the jackals in middle and high school who saw every peg that stood out as a good excuse to get a hammer. So I survived high school that way. However, college was a different story.

In college, on my first programming test in COMP 210, I got a D. This was my supposedly chosen field, and I didn’t get it. The one real thing I had going for me was now no longer there. Here begins the grand illusion of my life. Once I got that D, I could have packed it in, admitted to myself that yeah, maybe I wasn’t meant to be a programmer, and found something else to do. But that would be against everything that had worked for me up to that point. Momentum is a funny thing–it carries you along even when you don’t really want to go in that direction. It carried me through college with lots of study groups and help from other people. It carried me through the different jobs I’ve had. So I stuck it out and wound up in testing. It’s a safer portion of the computer world; you don’t have to program, you just have to know about programming and how programmers approach problems. So for me, it’s been a decent fit. But still, it feels like this large part of my life, this part of who I am (because I have a hard time separating who I am from what I do) is built on a facade. It’s all built on the premise that no one will look too closely at the transcript and see Where I Wasn’t Right, or hear in the interview not about the times When I Was Right, but they’ll find out When I Wasn’t Right.

I know that fears like this may be in a lot of people. I know I’m not alone in fear of failure, but I don’t think I know of a good way to get out of it. I go to counseling, I take medication, I intellectually know all the things I should do to become a better person so I don’t Have To Be Right. I also know (again, intellectually) the spiritual side of letting go of it.

But I can’t do it. I don’t know any other way to live. However, at the very least I can say I’ve identified one of the things that’s driven me. Driven me crazy, probably, but driven me all the same.