let me be done

It's been a rough week.

Excluding the emotional stress of outside events, work has me at a breaking point right now. It's not the job itself; I still love writing, still get excited when my byline appears; still get a kick out of meeting the legislators and striking up a rapport with them. My 60-hour week has at least ensured that I feel more comfortable in this setting, and lets me address (most) representatives with ease.

But it's been an awful few days. I don't do well when I'm sleep-deprived; I do even worse when I'm praise-deprived. I don't know where this comes from -- maybe having such wonderful, encouraging parents has set an impossible standard for the rest of the world and I require that affirmation everywhere I go -- but if I'm not being told that I'm good enough, then I'm not good enough.

This job is so much what I've been hoping for -- an in with the AP, the company I most want to work for, the broadest-reaching and arguably most recognized news organization in the world. My first job out of college -- that has to count for something, right?

And yet I sit here and know that I'm inadequate. It's such a contradictory feeling; I'm frustrated and angry with my parents and friends when they don't believe me when I tell them that I'm not good at this. They don't understand -- my mom cites all my bylines as evidence that I'm doing well, and doesn't listen when I tell her that those stories are shit, that they're easy, they're all spot news, they're not what I'm supposed to be doing. No one listens when I tell them that I got here because I'm lucky, because people like me and opened doors for me that I didn't deserve to walk through, because I've happened to be in the right place at the right time and had things fall into my lap.

I'm frustrated when non-work people don't believe me when I tell them that...and yet I would crumble if someone at my actual work agreed with me. From them, I need affirmation. I'm telling myself that I'm not good enough but I want them to tell me the opposite. I want to be told that it's ok, that I'm new, that I'm still learning, that I'm doing a good job.

But that's the problem. I'm right, and my parents/friends/encouragers are wrong, and I'm not doing a good job. I don't have the killer instinct; I don't understand the subtleties underneath their decisions; I don't see the deeper motives or understand the background story. I'm cut out for surface and surface only, which is what I've been doing all week...and even then, I screw things up.

I hate that all I do on this blog is whine; I would call and whine to individual people, instead, but I don't think I could keep my voice steady.

I'm exhausted by long nights and uncomfortable chairs and staring at a computer screen and one meal a day and no glimpse of daylight and the feeling that I'm letting everyone down. I was here from 9 a.m. to after midnight yesterday, stressed myself out of sleep for a couple hours then came in again at 10 today. And now we'll be here until at least 11 tonight.

The worst part is that there's nothing to look forward to. After we hit cut-off on Monday night, I have to get back to my real story -- my "Where Things Stand" story that looks at the status of the big issues at this halfway point in the session. Again, I'm good for surface only -- I know which bills are alive or dead, but fail miserably at understanding the current state of budget agreements, workers' comp, and Capitol dynamics.

I want a break; I want friends; I want to rewind about 6 months and go back to life as a student when everything was simple. I'm just not good enough to do this in the real world. I'm not tough and independent and fearless. I don't know what I am.

Love always,
molly