Overachievers Anonymous

It’s a late night hour, sleep doesn’t look like it’s going to happen any time soon. I drank too much caffeine and took too much vitamin B this morning in a desperate attempt to stay awake, alert, entertaining, and inspiring during my regular, twice-weekly, three hour interactive impromptu stage production many call “teaching two courses back-to-back.”

The over stimulation made my brain skip like a trashed children’s record, and even though I spent last week preaching against succumbing to the grip of the victim mentality, I blame a lack of sleep for causing me to make three (completely unintentional) sexual innuendos during one 1.5 hour lecture. The students seemed to be thoroughly entertained and I have a hunch they didn't even notice me skip a beat, but none of those things are neither examples nor standards I want to set in my classroom.

When I got home, I crashed and burned for a 2.5 hour nap. Staring at this glowing computer screen isn’t going to make falling asleep come very easily tonight, either. Disrupted sleep pattern, a mind heavy full of thoughts, a pre-existing chronic tendency for insomnia... sad to say, this type of night is all to familiar to me. It’s a regular formal evening event that I never intend to RSVP for, yet I always wind up making an appearance, and always wind up staying way too long.

What’s on my mind? Lot of stuff. Lots of things I don’t have the guts to write about for public reading, so I’ll stick to the comfortable topic that I like writing about anyway and people seem to often relate to: Work and Self-Doubt.

Many of my students like me, and thankfully, I genuinely like all of them (*knock on wood*), both as separate individuals and as entire masses of classes. I feel incredibly lucky and humbled every time someone tells me they like being in my class. I received an e-mail today from a student confessing that he signed up for this course because he thought it would be three easy units, but is now convinced it should be required for all new college students. Two people have pulled me aside to tell me they feel blessed that they have enrolled in my class. I love to read the little “thank yous” jotted down at the end of homework assignments for things I’ve said or done, or light I’ve shed on new perspectives.

Part of me feels like I shouldn’t be writing any of this, part of me wonders why I’m even writing at all and not digging through my closet for a misplaced stash of Tylenol PM. I feel like what I post could easily be mistaken for self-importance, but that’s the funny thing- the more “Thank Yous,” I recieve, the more inferior I feel. The more people tell me, “what you say makes sense” the more I seem to question myself and wonder if anything I do makes sense. The more compliments I get that what I am doing is right on track, the more pressure grows inside me that I’m not doing things quite good enough.

Don't get me wrong- I work hard, I love what I do, and I do feel like I do a good job. And I’m a glutton for approval, too! What in the heck is up with that, anyway?! I LOVE hearing people say thank you and giving me positive feedback. Strangely, though lately it’s as if the more praise I get, the more I feel I don’t deserve it, in a way. I have this sense that while I am inspiring new thresholds in other people, I am somehow regressing and backing out of something…. It’s almost as if I am trying to back out of their confidence in me.

Maybe I’m still just really friggin' tired. I have a tendency to doubt myself when I’m tired. And I am known for being quite the self-defeating over-achiever.

Is this normal?