Sunday, March 29, 2009:

Hi to anyone who might read this:

I'm feeling good today for the first time in a while. I think that updating the website is something that I do when everything is just right. If, however, I'm writing in the journal it's more likely that things are more real than just right. Since that sounds so... dark I should explain why so people aren't too worried. First of all Sara and I are get along great, she has been a really great friend and partner during what's been a more stressful year than I thought it would be. I think I'm learning a lot about myself and her and what motivates different sets of feelings and actions. The human psyche is subtle, complicated, dynamic, and so on... but I am always driven to explore it. In fact, one of the central drives in my exploration is to really feel not so different, to know that I'm not crazy or alone when I think and act the way I do. I only know how my inner-dialogue sounds and I can never really hear someone else's. I've been in gifted programs since I was a kid, this created some sort of a belief that somehow I'm different than other people. That's a confusing thought, just because I have to think of my perspective as normal, but I know that my sample-size is 1. As time goes on I... well I've typed this sentence three times already. So I guess I can't give some sentence which says what I'm thinking here. I just want to capture somehow the idea that everyone is sort of a unique collection of experiences and ideals and so on, but at the same time people kind of box themselves into genres and groups to help feel connected and not so alone.

I'm kind of off of my original topic, but who cares, this is more for me and my own desire to feel connected and not so alone without settling for being this type of person or that. In fact, when writing like this I think I'm motivated by the idea that some friend or another will read it and think... yeah, I know exactly what you mean and get it. It's really no different than wanting to be part of a high-school clique, just with more emphasis on being honest with yourself. It's all just nonsense I guess. Of course that sentence is evidence of some sort of internal ego/super-ego struggle, which is I think what my job stress is all about too. Nice segway if I do say so myself.

So what motivates your actions? Or better yet, what gives you your sense of work-ethic? I've learned about myself over the years that I have near-infinite energy when it comes to getting a pat on the head. If you think of my abilities as fantastic and awe-inspiring and you need some math or programming done, of any sort, I'll drop everything and work 24/7 until your job is done, all for the reward of just that genuine sense of appreciation in your voice. I thrive on that voice. I'm pretty sure my dad does too. It's some sort of misplaced desire to earn the love of our respective dads, which is misfiled in our minds as a sort of christian-style of charity and selfless giving. I don't think it's very selfless though, in fact it is one of the central sources of energy/motivation in my life. I think I've learned how to use it effectively, by surrounding yourself with people who will help emotionally reward you for jobs that should benefit your life anyway. I got through my Ph.D. on such super-human bursts of motivation from my advisor, and whenever I screwed up or slacked I tended to wait until I could dink my way through the task the long way before seeing him again. Like I was afraid of when I wasn't being impressive, so typically most of the great work got done in several one or two week periods when I work tirelessly all night, get that great sense of appreciative approval the next day and repeat for as long as I could keep it up and arrange daily meetings. So it created a huge up and down cycle of productivity, where I would produce massive amounts of work in short bursts of approval then have weeks of avoiding him and focusing on other sources of approval: like my teaching or boardgames or whatever else I could find. Of course it's not as psychotic as it sounds because this is all sub-conscious, but in hind-sight this is definitely the pattern.

So the healthiness of this cycle aside, as a post-doc I've been to over 15 little visits at workshops and conferences and invited talks and such, at each one I meet people who find my work interesting and create some starting dialogue. Each of them has played the little part of my inspiration, so now with so many psuedo-advisors if one project dies off a little I could jump to the next and work tirelessly for their approval too. This was super exciting when I began, I was creating exciting work in lots of areas and so on, and working at super-human levels fairly consistently. During this time of high approval I put out tons of material on the website too, everything was going great and I have nothing to hide. Then after a couple months of this exciting approval-laden workload came the first job applications. In a one-year post doc I started in September and have to begin applying for new jobs in October, so none of this new exciting work was going to help my applications, plus I had no idea how to write a good application and no one who would be proud of my application and give me that pat-on the head. So writing apps was something that I didn't have energy for because I would much rather work on something that gives me that positive feedback. So I struggled through writing apps and it was mind-numbingly awful. After the huge drain of writing an application I would get a rejection meaning I have to do it all over again. In the meantime all of the possible sources of my approval and motivation were no longer as impressed with me because I wasn't outputting the same as I started with, as I lack the same super-human strength for writing applications. In fact after meeting so many people (which has really been a positive experience) I am overwhelmed with the amount of work I could be doing. Also no one is as impressed by good work here, because you have to do good work to survive, so I find myself lacking my usual motivation and having a very large and vague to-do list. In fact rather than explain why its vague I'll just tell you the way it seems in my inner-mind, 'a decent post-doc in my position has to do the following: read lots of papers, make a great implementation of my algorithms, write up more papers, figure out how so and so's ideas and mine can merge, make perfect application packets for 100 jobs, give many talks'. Now if there are five people, each one will judge me on a different little scale, so if this week I worked on implementations one friend will think I slacked another will approve of my work.

So that's a complicated little mess, but the central issue is that I use other people's approval as the best source of energy. I can do things for myself, but I work many times harder for someone else. This job is full of different opinions about what I should be doing, short on approval, and chocked full of criticism. That combined with my own little issues has played hell on my sense of self-worth. So, I am faced with a problem and there are very distinct directions for resolving it. I can try to alter my source of motivation, you know, pyschological surgery by which I can derive the same super-human strength from my own projects and not just from other people's praise, like if the math itself was reward enough then such problems wouldn't exist. In the same vein, I could go to town on my self-esteem, but I'm afraid that if I were loaded with self-esteem I wouldn't really work at all, that's probably a cop-out. The other direction is to accept this as my own personal weakness and not fight it... just find a different job where I know I can excel and get lots of praise for doing so. Like teaching or doing industry with a really good boss. When thinking about this or talking about it I think that people are a little divided about whether personal change is possible or not. Some people love to think of change as possible, it's optimistic to think so. Other people seem to view it as creating pyschosis to resist your nature so much. In fact one's view on this particular decision is probably a by-product of your childhood and religion and world-view. So what is my world-view? I don't know, I've gotten myself into messes by thinking I can change other people, and I don't think I want to ever try that again. What about personal change? Can I adjust the source of my motivation? It seems like taking the easy way out to switch jobs, but why choose any job over another? I fear failure and criticism on some deep level, I think I rationalize that with not wanting stuff and status, which I really don't. It would be nice not to have such fears, but that takes a real shift in perspective and some real pyscho-analysis. Anyway, I think that maybe everybody faces such questions, but I never really hear people talking about it. Living in France if you talk to an old friend most of the conversation is spent just telling them what is new in your life which is bound to be superficial because it's a conversation between two people and it's not likely to last more than an hour or two, and it took that long just to write down my own inner thoughts today without being interactive and hearing someone elses. Friends here in France are new, we've known each other only a few months and without a car and with jobs and such you don't hangout all the time like you would with roommates or friends in college, and when you do it's with a minimum of 4 people so again conversations stay fairly superficial, or maybe abstract about politics and the world and other nonesense. I guess this is growing up. While thinking about it more, I'm pretty sure that in the vast majority of all conversations I participate in I play the role of myself, sort of a stereotype of who I am, because so few people ever see any sort of struggle in me. It is very rarely that I can really let go of my self-image in a conversation so that I can be truly vulnerable, I always have an eye on how the other person percieves me in the conversation. This strong desire for approval keeps me at arm's length from almost everyone, even people who've known me for a long time. In fact I've always wanted to talk to bums, I think this is because I'm less likely to care what they think and I could really let loose or something. So I'm taking a public place where I can write intimate thoughts which are even embarassing at times, because in this format I don't have to supress my constant reading of the other person's reactions to what I'm saying. If I'm talking to you and some little facial movement or voice intonation reveals your stance, even mid-sentence, it will immediately shift my tones and words, sometimes even paralyze me mid-sentence. It allows me to thrive in business-type conversations where the content of your words is practical, but I can't turn it off... So to get real intimacy in a conversation you've got to really make a point of creating a conversational atmosphere of emotional intimacy so that both people are receptive and vulnerble and such an atmosphere can quickly shift if the topic moves to an internal soft spot with defense mechanisms or some pyschological over-ride. So fostering such moments out loud is really difficult, and requires just the right time and people and world-views for the given topic. Oddly I think I have a different friend for each of the major topics in my life that might need real external insight. Wow, these thoughts are so clear in my mind, but sound nearly insane on paper. I guess it creates that desire to know that other people think like I do, which I said before is almost nonsense and leads to over-simplifying life and thoughts in order to feel like part of a group.