Hating the dream
The problem with living the dream, as oppose to, oooh, say, working as a lazy-arse temp in a college in Wandsworth, is that it's actually quite tough sometimes. I never dared hope I'd get to do what I love to do for a living, but one day, my fairy godmothers wiggled her wand, jiggled her tiara, shimmied her bustle and... *sparkle-shimmer-POOF!*... I found myself with a fabulous job beyond any ridiculous day-dream ever dreamed during those long, lonely hours spent pretending to order stationery.
What never occurred to me in all my day dreams is that if I wanted to become, you know, good at stuff, I would have to work at it for a quite considerable amount of time. This is where fantasy wins - clearly I would rather be an undiscovered genius, a diamond in the rough, whose amazing talents would have caused flabbergasted colleagues to gossip excitedly about me in hushed whispers, possibly before breaking into some kind of all-singing, all-dancing routine entitled something like "I Think She's Got It! (We've Never Seen Anything Like It Before)".
Yeahhhh. So.
The problem with pursuing the dream is accepting the fact that most people at work with more experience are far better at the job than me. Of course, they are all lovely, helpful and patient and hopefully I will be as good as them one day. I don't know why I didn't learn my lesson in Ms Casey's class - I dreamed then of shimmying up the rope in gym, back-flipping across the playground like Maxine Poulter (bitch) and scrabbling up the apparatus to the roof of the school hall like a leotard-clad little monkey. In reality, I couldn't even make it onto the box with the aid of a springboard and dangled desperately on the end of the rope before plopping pathetically onto the plasticised foam mat half a meter below.
Of course, I didn't bother trying to be a gymnast and I'm glad, because quite frankly puberty took long e-bloody-nough to find me as it was. If I'd spent my youth hurtling madly over big planks of wood, I'd probably still be sitting here in my BhS 30AA "god chest, will you get on with it" bra.
But I want to be good at this, and I've realised that in order to totally rock and have awe-struck juniors running to save me a seat in the canteen (stop it), it is necessary to feel stupid, get it wrong, sit and watch others pull my work apart and tell me why I didn't get it quite right. It's not the greatest feeling in the world, but it makes it all the sweeter when someone says: "Well done, you did a good job on that."
"By the way, you spell storeys with an e-y."
Bugger.
What never occurred to me in all my day dreams is that if I wanted to become, you know, good at stuff, I would have to work at it for a quite considerable amount of time. This is where fantasy wins - clearly I would rather be an undiscovered genius, a diamond in the rough, whose amazing talents would have caused flabbergasted colleagues to gossip excitedly about me in hushed whispers, possibly before breaking into some kind of all-singing, all-dancing routine entitled something like "I Think She's Got It! (We've Never Seen Anything Like It Before)".
Yeahhhh. So.
The problem with pursuing the dream is accepting the fact that most people at work with more experience are far better at the job than me. Of course, they are all lovely, helpful and patient and hopefully I will be as good as them one day. I don't know why I didn't learn my lesson in Ms Casey's class - I dreamed then of shimmying up the rope in gym, back-flipping across the playground like Maxine Poulter (bitch) and scrabbling up the apparatus to the roof of the school hall like a leotard-clad little monkey. In reality, I couldn't even make it onto the box with the aid of a springboard and dangled desperately on the end of the rope before plopping pathetically onto the plasticised foam mat half a meter below.
Of course, I didn't bother trying to be a gymnast and I'm glad, because quite frankly puberty took long e-bloody-nough to find me as it was. If I'd spent my youth hurtling madly over big planks of wood, I'd probably still be sitting here in my BhS 30AA "god chest, will you get on with it" bra.
But I want to be good at this, and I've realised that in order to totally rock and have awe-struck juniors running to save me a seat in the canteen (stop it), it is necessary to feel stupid, get it wrong, sit and watch others pull my work apart and tell me why I didn't get it quite right. It's not the greatest feeling in the world, but it makes it all the sweeter when someone says: "Well done, you did a good job on that."
"By the way, you spell storeys with an e-y."
Bugger.
posted by Elizabeth at 6:51 PM
1 Comments:
Ah i SO know the feeling - i still day dream of suddenly being discovered and starring in a major movei before winning my Oscar. Heck - i even have nervous day-dreams about tripping up the stairs towards my acceptance speech and go arse over tit in my posh frock! *sigh*
well don on doing a good job though - am very proud of you!
Post a Comment
<< Home