Four weeks of working full time under the belt. I love my job, even though it is filled with a mountain of tiny details that I have to internalize. Every day I learn something new: it’s like learning all the rules for a foreign language, then learning all the exceptions and irregularities of those rules. You know, it’s always this way. Except when it’s not. It’s frustrating only because I am the type of person who hates being “new” and who wants to know everything at once; to be an expert at everything on Day One. I hate being inept and still under construction, if you will. Maybe that’s why I never was hip on the idea of building a house from scratch; I’m too impatient to imagine the possibilities; I just want to skip to the end to see the result.
I’m going through a kind of tired, too, that I haven’t felt
in a long time. I go to bed and it
seems like five minutes later the alarm is going off and it’s time to get up. I come home at night and before I can
blink it’s time to go to bed and do it all over again. There just doesn’t seem to be any down
time. My husband and I are the
proverbial ships passing in the night.
I know, whine, whine, whine.
Cry me a river. Welcome to
the Real Word.
The best part is the level of satisfaction I have in the
fact that I am working in my field.
I went to school, studied hard, and earned a degree in library
science. Now I am actually working
in a real live library, using some of the actual things I learned in
school. Cataloging is meticulous
and subjective at the same time; it was one of the courses I enjoyed the most
in school and here I am, getting paid to do just that. In all of the jobs I held in the past,
mostly in the legal field, I felt incompetent, untrained and ill-prepared. I went to law school for a year, yes,
but I never felt that I was good enough; I was completely insecure in my
abilities. In one case I really
did make a huge mistake that was a result of my lack of supervision and true
ignorance. (Being asked to take on
the project, I remember thinking, okay, I’ll do that, just hang on one second
while I go to law school “right quick”.
I’ll be right back!) The
powers-that-were never made me feel bad about my screw-up, not to blame myself,
etc., but I still felt guilty. Attorneys
always have the final responsibility for a paralegal in their employ, but it
still hurt and was embarrassing.
Of course, if you make a mistake in cataloging a book, no
one is going to die, and it’s easy to correct. The stakes are not as high (thank goodness!) Now I feel confident, secure in my
knowledge and education. It’s the
kind of job that I always wanted.
I’m being trained well, and that, in combination with what I learned in
school, is the perfect culmination of a lot of dreams.
All this happened at the same time my book came out. It’s been a great couple of months,
feeling like I have accomplished a lot.
All those years of feeling half-baked and not good enough are behind me
(but not so far behind me that I get cocky!)
The down side is that I have so little time for my little
Third Culture Kid blog. I hope
that I am still in my adjustment period, so to speak, with my state of
exhaustion, and that I will fall into a steady hum of existence soon. Seeing hundreds of books every day
(agonizing not to be able to read them all!) gives me a plethora of ideas about
life to write about, I just need to sleep on the weekends! In the meantime, check out my Facebook
page, at Recovered Third Culture Kid, where I post snippets of TCK
interest. In the words of the
immortal Terminator, “I’ll be back.”
Check out this review of my book on Amazon. (Full disclosure: it was written by my friend Anthony Roberts whose books "Sons of the Great Satan" and "Dead'r Than Elvis: Tall Tales of Texas Bullsh*t" I talked about earlier).
Check out this review of my book on Amazon. (Full disclosure: it was written by my friend Anthony Roberts whose books "Sons of the Great Satan" and "Dead'r Than Elvis: Tall Tales of Texas Bullsh*t" I talked about earlier).