When I was at my most desperate for work, I was also at my least motivated to get up and look for it. That didn’t mean I stopped or gave up; I knew I couldn’t do that. It meant I undertook every online application, every mailed-in resume, with a soap episode’s worth of internal emotional turmoil. I forced myself daily just to get these out.
Very few of these applications led to in-person interviews. At those, I behaved like a grunt soldier slogging through a muddy bloody trench. I fought against all odds to appear positive and lucid. Even then, I knew I couldn’t reach further, into becoming the perky hustler type I thought they all really wanted.
At the time, I said I had a “fear of sales.” More precisely, I succumbed to, but dreaded, the idea that I had to somehow adopt the persona of a high-pressure salesman just to pay my mortgage. I gained a hateful obsession with such self-help slogans as “marketing yourself for success” or “the brand called you.” I figuratively cowered in intimidated rage whenever I saw a website, a junk email, a newspaper ad, or an infomercial that defined aggressive sales-hustling as the only means toward material survival.
I didn’t want that. I still don’t. This world shouldn’t be all about the Survival of the Rudest.
Like many Seattle liberals, I’d developed an instinctual abhorrence toward toward the symbols of uber-aggression–elephantine SUVs, talk-radio bigots, political-corporate bullying, warmongering.
Beyond these, I’d added generic techno music, stupid white rap-metal music, the coke-snorting and fag-bashing antics of First Avenue fratboys, the incessant self-promotion of certain “counterculture celebrities,” and the elitist preachings of certain fundamentalist vegans and Riot Grrls to my own personal list of aggressive behaviors to shun.
But now, I’d come to believe that I both had to become just such a pompous pusher and that I couldn’t.
I just wanted to perform good work(s), and to be compensated accordingly. Was there really anything excessively naive about that?
I now know there wasn’t, and isn’t. I now more confidently believe not only that you shouldn’t have to act like a Qwest telemarketer, but that you needn’t.
No, there are many types of self-confidence. And ultra-loud bombast isn’t necessarily one of them. It could be a sign of suppressed intimidation.
I don’t need to turn into somebody else. I just need to become a better (more centered, more alert, more empathetic) me.
