I'm starting to think I might be depressed...again. It's getting hard to even mention any redeeming qualities about myself because it just doesn't seem like there are any. There's nothing that I can think of that I do particularly well anymore. No matter what it is, there's always a billion other people who are better at it to the point where I don't even have much of a chance.
I'm quite useless.
Worse yet, I can't see any end to this in sight. I suppose it's good that I recognize that this isn't the way I should be thinking, but I still can't seem to dig myself out of it. I've just been in this hole for a few weeks now.
I don't have anyone here who I'd feel comfortable telling this to, so here ya go, Internets, have at it.
this post will probably self-destruct once I feel guilty about it and nuke it from orbit
Hello sista.
I need to ask you to do yourself a favor.
Take jo face, and make like dis:
https://pic.armedcats.net/l/lu/lurkerpatrol/2011/09/17/smiling-dog1_1_.jpg
If you call yourself useless and dog yourself like that (no pun intended) you're going to sink further. And if you say things like "there's always X amount of people who are better than me", you're just going to aggravate it.
Lemme tell you my feelings about this in the form of a RL experience and story. It involves me being so unconfident at work for the last oh I dunno year or so.
I had always felt that my labmate Emily had more experience than me with certain things because she has a masters. But she texted me the other day asking about what the composition of a brown dwarf was. This is basic stuff that she should know from doing this work for a YEAR AND A HALF! I used to dog myself constantly and used to say "fuck this, Emily is so much better than me, she knows so much more than me", but the truth is (obviously) she doesn't.
I have always been apprehensive about presenting things in a lab meeting, especially when it comes to my writing. My mentor loves to red pen everything. So I always just swallow my sadness and present it to him as if it's the greatest thing he's ever seen, because I give it my full effort. He loves it. Emily on the other hand, was working her ass off.. comes to one of the final lab meetings and starts BAWLING her ass off. Literally BAWLING. She couldn't even write a couple pages of work. She kept crying for a good solid 20 minutes. All while sitting right next to me, with my labmate Sarah on skype video chat, with the postdoc, with my labmate Natalie, and of course my boss. It was the most awkwardly terribad thing ever.
The point is, no-one is better than you at everything and anything, and no-one knows more than you and is sexier than you (apart from George Clooney for the guys and Angelina Jolie for the girls and MWF). You know a fuck ton of shit. You are talented at 2 fucktons of shit. You are capable of turning the world with your pinky and not breaking a sweat.
So get out there and show them who's boss! The only way you can do that is to give everything you do your full effort, and to feel as if you know and can do everything and anything. It makes a big big big big big big big big difference coming into something with a great amount of confidence versus coming into something feeling like you can't do it.
YOU GO GURRL. YOU GOT DIS!