"Face Your Fears"

...Yeah, right. This is one of those trope sayings of civilization that we've all heard, but that more often than not I think, we've discovered just isn't as simple as the saying goes.

Recently, with all the job-applying, unsolicited school-visiting, job-interviewing I've been confronted with, I've been more stressed out than I ever remember being in my 18 years of formal schooling. There are very few things short of actual physical torture than would rank higher on my "least favorite things" list than job-applying and interviewing. Don't get me wrong, I had my moments of academic stress, but this job search stress is different. It's not that you're limited by time or energy or brainpower; it's an emotional stress. It's the emotional stress of facing a paralyzing pathological phobia.

Granted, I haven't been as much of an emotional disaster as I found myself last fall, but I have been battling through a series of my own insecurities in the last month and a half, and, honestly, I feel I'm losing. I literally walked out of visiting schools just a few weeks ago, collapsed into the driver's seat of the car, and just started to bawl my eyes out. For me, presenting myself professionally and eloquently to authority figures and potential employers is excruciating, because when I'm around them, it seems like any slight traces of gracefulness I might have had just disappear. I'm awkward. I trip over my words. I actually trip over my things. I look the person who's questioned me in the eyes, and my mind just draws a blank. Seriously, I think I may have a strange form of stage fright that onsets in any and every adult encounter. This level of shame and embarrassment for me is only comparable to my high school days of volleyball and softball, but at least back then after I screwed up, I could just hang my head and say sorry. Dropping the ball (literally) sucks, but at the very least I could be open and apologetic about stinking, and it wasn't going to drastically affect my education and future career. I don't lie very well, and I don't have a professional poker face.

As with my athletic experiences, I also have not been getting much better with time and practice. It took me three years to acquire the ability to underhand serve a volleyball over the net from the baseline (it took the majority of my peers half a 7th-grade-season); I anticipate it will take me at least a decade to walk into an interview without adrenaline pumping through my system with the force of several cups of coffee, or to keep my voice from shaking with it.

I just wish I could walk into these job situations and shoot straight. I wish I could just look my potential employers in the eye and say, "Look, I'm rubbish at all this, but I promise, I work hard, I've had a decent education, and I genuinely work to love and challenge all my students. I may not have it all together, but I will try my best to get it together, because I don't want to let my students or my school down." Saying anything else feels like a lie. Like to get a job in today's world, you're expected to put up a front and facade, which is, to me, just wrong. Sorry, everyone, but I'm a screwed-up human in a screwed-up world, and I don't think I should lie about that.

After eighteen years of straight schooling, I have learned one very important thing about myself: I know how to be a student. I don't know how to be just about anything else.