Musings

When I first started my job, three years ago, it seemed impossible. I felt like it would be ages before I could achieve what was expected of me, if ever.

Now I'm doing what's expected of me, and I believe I'm doing it adequately (certainly haven't received any indications to the contrary), but I don't feel like it's anything special.

This would probably indicate that I have more skills than I did three years ago, but I don't feel like I do. I have more experience, more familiarity with common genres, more familiarity with what kinds of situations are likely to cause me to make mistakes, but I'm not doing anything special. And I don't know when it became nothing special. Probably when our team* suddenly shrank - there was no time to fret over how I didn't know how to do anything, the deadlines were piling up and it had to get done. So I just kind of muddled through, did the best I could, and it somehow ended up being satisfactory.

*Aside: my father has this thing, where whenever I use the word team, he keeps trying to convince me that my work team isn't a really a team, via some definition that he read in some book. And apparently if I can't rattle offthat definition word for word, nothing I say about anything counts for anything, and I must defer to him about my team not being a team, despite the fact that he has no idea how things are even done in my workplace. And people wonder why I moved out.