It’s taken me a while to work out this stuff too, and I understand it as “if you don’t ask the answer will always be no”.. and in the asking “there is the possibility that the answer may be no”.. I like my odds when I ask.

Go and fucking rock on Dorky! And I reckon there needs to be a celebration of the rockin’ things that the harpies do, and do incredibly well!!!

I’m utterly failing to come up with examples from my own life so far, but one thing you wrote really resonated: ‘I’m acting like I am a professional, not a student or a puppyish apprentice’.

When I started a job teaching last year in a foreign country, with zero experience and just about zero preparation (no teaching qualification of any kind!), I remember wanting at some points, when the going got particularly tough, to just run away and forget about the whole business. The mantra that got me through it was more or less ‘you’re a grown up and a professional now, whether you feel like it or not, so get on with it and do what’s necessary to do a good job’. Somehow, it really helped…

I wrote about this in a post a couple years ago about being underpaid and how it took me longer than it should to get off my ass and get another fucking job already (adjective there!) when my boss didn’t deliver on a promised raise/promotion. It was a huge, permanent boost for my ego when I was hired within a month for 40% more than I had been earning. It made me realize that I did, in fact, rock my job, and that if I had done this once, I could do it again. That’s carried me through a few other moments in my career when I had doubts or disappointments.

I dunno if it’s the new meds or what, Dorkie, but I’m glad you are back in touch with the fact that YOU FUCKING ROCK and the fuckers who underpay you are lucky to have you. It’s so not you, it’s them.

One of the things I’ve gotten a lot better at in the last three-to-five years is taking people up on their offers to help me connect to people and resources that will further my scholarly (and other) goals. So for example when someone shows interest in my work, I’m much bolder at sending them a PDF of a presentation, or a link to a blog post. I email people whose work I think might mesh well with mine. I offer to write book reviews or blog posts. During grad school I submitted proposals for conferences, papers to journals, applications for grants.

Nothing huge, it’s true, but even the small stuff requires that leap of faith — that belief that your ideas are worth people paying attention to. I don’t think there’s a magic formula, and that thinking you’re a person of worth automatically means other people will think you’re a person of worth … but it’s true that believing in your worthiness, and the worthiness of your endeavors, gives you a source of energy to make yourself that little bit more public.

Not, again, that I have the magic formula for deciding you’re worthy if you have trouble believing it. So complicated!

Is it my appellation or my word play on the double meaning of ‘fucking’ (and the hopeful humour) that prevents my previous comment from being positively moderated?
Or is it something else?

Don’t ‘positively moderate’ this comment though.

Previously I had basically been minimally involved as I felt others could offer so much more.

Coincidently I went on brain meds somewhat-shortly before all of that. (Hurray!)

If you would have us consider your use of the word ‘fucking’ in the above to be as a noun, how could it not pay off?

If, conversely, we are to understand the word to be an adjective, I commiserate.