I had an interview for a student government ministry today. I had applied to the cultural ministry for three different portfolios. I really want to get in and I am very anxious. It reminded me immediately of the interviews I underwent for colleges, for the various clubs and events that I have been a part of, in college. And I am afraid that I am being over-confident this time. It is a scary feeling that I expect myself to get selected (there, I finally said it), that I want to get selected. But I also know that it is very tough to get selected, especially because there were so many others who had applied. All who have been doing substantial amounts of work so far.
Before filling the application, I had to ask myself a thousand times if I had it in me. I have been juggling quite a lot already and I didn’t know if I could add another item to my plate. But after a lot of time thinking about it, I realised that this was something I really wanted to do. The added advantage is that it would look good on my resume (there, I said this too). It is liberating to say things out loud. I have been trying to understand whether my motivation for applying to the ministry was because of its value in my resume or because I liked the job description. And I realised that it was both and I did not want to confront that part of myself.
It has been ingrained in me that joining something for the value it adds to your CV is being shallow and pretentious. I wouldn’t be surprised if I still think that. Precisely why I did not want to think about my own motivations for applying. But I have also realised that this is not necessarily a bad thing. I can apply for a multitude of reasons and my CV can be one of them. It is not a crime or something that should be abhorred. In fact, I think it helps to do some things because of the value it adds to your CV. It shows an extra skill you are capable of and don’t we all like to feel good about ourselves.
But then, all this talk as if I have already got in. My friends think I will because I got through other interviews so far. It has been a bit of a dream run, almost too good to be true. Now, I am not going to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I am constantly terrified of whether changing times will make me confront possibilities of immense failure. And it is definitely not a reassuring thought, trust me.
I don’t want to be overconfident, it sets me up for disappointment. I don’t want to be self-deprecating (though that is what happens most of the time). It is easy to be hard on yourself and think bad about yourself. When it is my own work that I am critiquing, it is so much easier to think bad about it and feel like it is dumb. It is a mechanism, a way of tackling my own sense of deteriorating self-worth (by reinforcing the inadequacies? I do like to torture myself, I am noticing). But then, everyone is filled with these contradictions within themselves. And we don’t notice those as much as we do ourselves. We are all narcissistic creatures who think almost all the time about ourselves (this whole, in fact, an example of this). But then, is being Narcissus narcissarily (necessarily, in case you didn’t get the joke) a ‘bad’ (whatever ‘bad’ may be) thing?
And that’s my memory for the day.
The Memory Of A Storyteller 