Cari-bein'

The Permission Fairy gave me a Gold Medal.

I just read two posts that couldn't have been more different in tone, but were really sort of about the same thing. The first was written by an obviously very bright (and very funny) woman who's spending the week at a snooty place doing some executive education. I know from people who've aspired to attend those weeks that in the business world it's considered pretty high-end stuff. In her post, she debates the endless dilemma of choosing business OR art...(since finding that perfect meld of the two seems to be a near impossible task).

The second post was written by a woman who met with a possible customer yesterday and felt completely awkward socially and that her work didn't cut it. She wrote about not feeling edgy or hip enough. By the end of her post that was her goal: to get an 'edge.'

I left a comment on the first site and started to on the second site, but thought she might misinterpret my comment. I wanted to lend support and tell her that in my opinion maybe what she was missing wasn't an 'edge' because there's room for all kinds of art in the world and a lot of people don't resonate with really cutting-edge, angry stuff--in fact, most of America doesn't resonate with it, so it's not like there's not a market for what she does. What came to mind reading her entry was my realization a few years ago that it wasn't that others had some skill or personality quirk I was lacking, it was that they just had the fucking balls to do it. They felt they had the right to do it, so they did. It suddenly hit me one day that I'd been unwittingly sitting there waiting for the Permission Fairy to wave her wand over me and tell me it was okay to do what I wanted to do. I used to look around at other people and think, "Why the hell does she think she'd be a good (fill in the blank)? She's not even that good." I spent decades having those kinds of thoughts. I, on the other hand, used to secretly think I'd be pretty good at a few things, but never did them in public because I was sitting there politely waiting for the Permission Fairy to call on me. I didn't even have my hand up. I just sat there...waiting. Until one day I realized that the Permission Fairy didn't exist.

The flip side of the same coin is that there's something about my demeanor or look or personality that causes people to thrust jobs on me that I feel completely and utter unqualified to do. In those cases, I spend the entire time feeling like at any minute I'm going to be exposed as the fraud that I am. But oddly, that never seems to happen. So at the end of each of those experiences I emerge triumphant and feeling like I've made my way through some harrowing mental and emotional gauntlet only to be rewarded with a Gold Medal in the Fake Olympics.

My goal these days is to see if I can eliminate Fairy, Fraud and Fake from my vocabulary.

posted by Marilyn @ 6:29 AM