I’m very tired. All humour aside, I only got about two hours of sleep last night, and right now it doesn’t look like I’m going to get any tonight. I’m trying to push through the tired, but one of the problems of this deep tired is that my brain gets stuck. Right now I’m stuck on the idea of expectations, and specifically how badly I react when people say something like “I’ve heard so many good things about you!” or “so’n’so’s really been talking about you a lot, you’re apparently awesome” and so forth.
Believe me, if you ever want to see me react badly, that’s a good way to go. I just… I get very flustered, but also uncomfortable and awkward. And my brain apparently decided to stick here, tonight.
I think, however, there’s a very reasonable rationale behind the discomfort. The more people praise you to others, the more chance you have to fall flat on your face, fail, be a disappointment. I think I’m simply afraid that people are going to talk me up so much, there’s no way I’ll be able to live up to the expectations.
I don’t like failing. I had a marriage dissolve because of mismatched expectations, and I don’t want the same thing to happen professionally.
I also struggle with compliments.