With Some Help From Starlord

I'm one to believe in lessons taught by the universe, or fate, or God, depending on your view. I tend to think that for many situations, there's a moral to be found, if you're looking for it, a thing that you can learn and apply to future situations. Sometimes we, as humans, don't learn those lessons right away or we learn them, but we fail to apply them to our current situations. This is one of those second ones, I think.

It's like with music. When you're starting out, you see a crescendo on the music and you don't know what to do with this sideways triangle that's missing a side and the director stops everyone, tells them how a crescendo works, practices it, and then asks them to do it. In a perfect world, one music teacher one time would have to teach students what a crescendo means and after that, every other crescendo would start out softly and get louder over the length of the marking in the music. But anyone who's been in any kind of music ensemble knows that this world is patently imperfect.

Now, I'm aware that no one else sees me the way I see myself. That is a lesson I've learned over and over again. The world inside of my head, which contains a substantial section where I analyze how my actions and words must be coming across to those outside of my head, often follows rabbit trails that in no way reflect reality. But I spend so much time on it, I assume it must be true. I assume that everyone else sees a bold, incompetent sucker who's barely holding it together because that section of my brain that analyzes my actions only picks out the actions that support that hypothesis to analyze. I've been told that my brain is mistaken.

I think this current bout of self-doubt stems from the newness of my situation. Again, it's like music. I spent eight years taking flute lessons and I got pretty good at it. I can pick up my flute and sightread most of the music that I'd need to play, maybe spend a couple of minutes on some tricky passages, and it'll all sound passable. When I switched to french horn, I did a whole lot of learning with significantly less practice time and while at the end of those eight years, I could pretty much play anything that needed playing, I'm less confident on horn than I am on flute. The graph of confidence goes down with each instrument depending on how much time I've practiced. My ukulele skills are better than my piano skills are better than my guitar skills are better than my organ skills. I know it's just a matter of practice at this point. All the basic skills and musical intelligence are in the bank, but applying those to new instruments takes time.

So when I'm reading these journal articles and book chapters and essays, I have to remember that I need to practice reading. John and Hank Green talked about that on their podcast last week- critical reading is a skill and you have to practice, or it gets rusty. And while I have all the time management, study skills, and critical thinking down from, you know, sixteen years of school, I'm applying them in new ways and that takes practice. It takes time. I'm not going to be automatically good at it. And that need for practice doesn't say anything about my intelligence or my value as a person. It just means that I have to practice.

The kicker here is that I'm the only one undervaluing myself because of that need for practice. I'm the only one who thinks I'm the dumbest dumb-dumb to ever dumb.¹ Everyone outside of my head has been incredibly supportive, seeing things in me that I typically gloss over. And the lesson I've learned that I have to apply again here is that I should listen to them and be supported and use that to get on with my life. Let's do this academic thing.

gifs source

I am good. I am smart. And I have a lot of studying to do.

---

 
1 This may also be due to some thing called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which I first read about in this fabulous article about the equally fabulous PBS Idea Channel.^↩