It’s odd, isn’t it, when you are able to say ‘twenty years ago’ and know that you were a (young and fairly useless) adult at the time. Rather than a small child. Odd that we have been adulting and evolving and coping and working and working stuff out for all that time. Getting better at being us. Moving in and out of light and shade; perhaps employed, self-employed, unemployed – a boss or a loner or a minion or a worker bee. Taking time off for a child or a nervous breakdown – or, as in this writer’s case, working through both.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that there would come a time when we’d all realise that we know what the fuck we’re talking about when it comes to one or two things? Just one or two, mind you. The rest is baffling.
And yet, do you start the week with a glance at your (terrifying… almost life-threatening) diary and the accompanying inner-query, ‘Is this the week that I get found out?’ If you’re a writer, that thought might occur to you while staring at a blank screen and realising that – soon – everyone will know that you can’t write. If you are a barrister, perhaps the thought strikes as you are wrestling with your wig. Maybe ad execs suffer the sudden revelation that it all means nothing and that they are at the centre of that nothing and surgeons?????? Oy. How stressful to hold a scalpel while veering between God complex and persecution complex.
Is it a female thing, this lightening bolt of self-doubt that explodes to the point where you wonder who will pay the mortgage once you have been ‘found out’ and carted off to career jail? And does it ever go away? Can we ever be sure that we are allowed to be here, justified in claiming authority and worth the cash we take home? Or can we only be sure of that some of the time. And some of the time isn’t sure at all, really? Is it?
