A Crisis in Confidence

I'm no longer a scientist.

Oh, I try to be, sometimes, in conversation. I have pretentions toward rationality, and order, and organized thinking.

But let's face it -- I haven't tried to *do* science in years. And that's holding me back whenever I trot out my dilapidated resume, with past glories receding further beyond ken and relevance. I used to joke, "I look great... on paper." I don't joke any more.

Whatever I do -- and who knows? it might be vaguely scientific/engineering related -- I have to retrain. I have to organize my life better. I have to study even when I hate what I'm learning. I suppose this is what "adults" do.

Do adults also live with perpetual senses of inadequacy and anxiety? You know, the sort that isn't easily medicated away? Some of this might be partially treated social anxiety. But some of it is just existential angst, the product of someone who has been comfortable or discomforted enough that he has devoted significant time to thinking about life and significantly less time actually living.

I'm 30 now. That's the boulder now; that's the deadweight. I suppose it replaces other, even more destructive ones. But I'm conscious that I missed some chances -- chances to take intelligent risks, fail, and learn something good from failure. I'm afraid now, not because I've failed -- though I have. But because a part of me feels like I need a success so badly that I can't afford another fuck up.

This Korea trip has exhausted me. I had to deal with a lot of crap, crap that honestly hurt opportunities I had to get to know people better, to enjoy being somewhere new and different, away from the old, bad world that swallowed my child-self quick. (If you think that an allusion to a post-apocalyptic poem is a bit extreme, you might be right, but then again, we also probably haven't spoken much about substantive personal matters.)

Dad will be dead soon -- perhaps this year, perhaps this month. I've been preparing for him to die for as long as I can remember; he's been near-death at least 10 times in the last 15 years. But this one might be real. And so this might be the first time I'm really coming to terms with the fact that I'll be losing an excuse for my own failings. I'm not losing a father -- not in the sense that I like to characterize fathers. But I'll be losing a friend, a sometimes-dependent, sometimes-selfish, sometimes-loving entity that has been the Julius Caesar of my life -- absent, but often playing a larger role in the action and denounement than any of the living characters on the stage.

I've gotten lazy, and soft. I've *been* lazy and soft for as long as I can think. That comes from a belief that I'm more fragile than perhaps I am. Besides, one of the advantages of not having a higher sense of self-worth should be a more cavalier attitude toward personal danger and failure, right? So perhaps the right choice is not to try to restore my self-worth; it is to destroy it completley. Time to go sublimate into some cause or faith or group.

Geez, this is self-indulgent tripe. But writing is better than not writing. I'll delete this soon, probably, but I'll leave it up at least as a testament to the collective anxiety and frustration that many people I know are feeling at this time.