So I spent some time on UpWork today. Almost an hour. And I applied for a bunch of stuff. There’s plenty more where that came from, too.

So, yay me.

It’s quite strange how my self-loathing disappears and I am suddenly all sunshine and confidence when I am applying for a gig. Perhaps it’s because I have an audience, one I am allowed to go all out to impress.

But I have always had a sort of on again/off again relationship with self-confidence. Within my little wheelhouse, I have bulletproof confidence.

It’s the confidence that comes from knowing exactly what you can and cannot do and thus being able to put yourself forth with the confidence of certainty.

It’s very INTJ

This confidence must be the source of why I have been told that the way I say things makes it sound like there is no possibility of disagreement. It’s a strange charge to level again someone because I could argue that if I believe something and state it as though I believe it, like everyone else, what’s the problem?

That was my attitude (and what an attitude) in my last year of high school and first year of college. It was both ego and cluelessness. The ego part is obvious – i was this super bright student who kicked ass at school and I was more than ready to flex my muscles and show the world what I could do.

I mean, college is supposed to be the holy grail for us brainy types. After a lifetime of low challenge and even lower respect, we were finally going someplace where academic skill is valued and encouraged and where they’d challenge me and intellectually engage me and everything would be SO AWESOME.

In retrospect, if I had wanted that, I should have gone to a better school.

Anyhow, the cluelessness on my part was my inability to imagine myself as someone who did not have my overcharged intellect and arrogant self-confidence and so I was blind to the fact that I was trampling all over people who were weaker than me when I charged to the fore in every class discussion.

In my defence, that wasn’t something I had to worry about at home. I come from a highly verbal, intellectual, intelligent family and so none of us felt like we had to slow down or simplify things.

In fact, I got trampled myself. Being the youngest and not as smart or confident as my siblings in my formative years. I was the one constantly running to keep up with their conversation and waiting for a chance to get a word in edgewise because I could not yet shoulder my way into the conversation like everyone else.

Picture me as the runt of the letter trying to get to a teat despite all the shoving and jostling from the full size piglets and you get the basic idea.

Perhaps that is one of the sources of my endless need for attention. I got so little of it and had to fight so hard for it that I am in constant starvation mode.

I see I have wandered off on a fascinating intellectual tangent again. Dammit. So what was I talking about again?

Oh right, job hunting on UpWork. I did it for almost an hour but had to stop because I had a pretty nasty panic attack near the end.

Suddenly I felt exposed and frightened and wrong, and so I had to lay down and read in order to let the stress chemicals drain away.

In retrospect, drinking Diet Coke with lunch was probably a bad idea. Caffeine might be great for giving me energy but it also overcharges my anxiety batteries and so it is no surprise I had a panic overload.

Tomorrow I will eschew the caffiene and go into the enterrprise alert to the possibility of panic and prepared to use various techniques to calm myself down.

It’s the sort of thing that makes me understand why so many writers drink heavily. The talent and the madness go hand in hand.

They are, in fact, two halves of the same whole. I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I think there has to be something broken in a person in order for certain life energies to only be able to be expressed through art.

I come to this conclusion partially via observation of others, both in person and via media, but mostly from self-examination. I have found that my verbal talents stem from an overwhelming need to communicate plus an inability to do so via “normal” means.

This desperate need to communicate, in turn, stems from being unable to connect with others on a human level. For me, the verbal-intellectual road to connection is the only road I know, and so all my energies get routed into doing that.

It’s a terrible substitute but it’s the only one I have, at least for now.

There’s a control/escape aspect too. Whether it’s me typing away or a painter daubing oils on a canvas or a composer stringing notes together, creating art lets a person disappear into a world of their own devising where they have total control.

So perhaps a need to flee the chaos of the world into my own private garden of the mind plays a part in it too.

So yeah. I get why writers drink. It’s a way to quiet the insanity for long enough to let the talent do its thing.

That way it is almost justifiable, like a business expense.

But I will stick with my video game addiction. Way fewer side effects and a lot less likely to destroy one or more important organs via repeated use.

And I am crawling out from under that one too. The games are losing their ability to keep me from feeling restless and unsatisfied and by doing so, opening the door to things like today’s short excursion into the world of UpWork.

Hey, I got back to the original subject!

What a lucky break!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.