I am postponing the waiver wire till thursday this week, because my head is swirling with all sorts of stuff. See, the moment you start to understand human behaviors you have to accept that you are going to see things that are not necessarily positive for you. Over the last two years I have notice a gradual easing of my responsibilities and importance in my job role. I am in no way being pushed out, but I am being minimized.
It is my fault, of course. In the first two years I worked at the job I served in a role that I did not do very well in. I underperformed, partly because of an inability due to newness and partly because I didn’t and perhaps don’t have the skills to do the task.
I like to blame these things on getting older. 10 years ago I thought I could walk into a calc 2 class and teach it better than anyone who’d ever tried. This despite not having taken or practiced math since the early 90’s. I believed in my own superhero status and approached the work that way. Today I feel like a dying old guppy in an aquarium with slick new fish and old frogs thundering past me, leaving me in their wake. I don’t know where this feeling came from or why I feel so powerless to change the game. Some of it is social. I know I’m sensitive to the feelings of others and I do not feel like I am looked at with the same sense of welcoming that was there when I arrived. Again, I probably made that happen with the initial epic fail.
The real question is can you roll back a first impression? When I think about how I feel about others, I know that it is hard to break from what you feel about someone. It takes a lot of work on their part and a lot of forgiveness on yours. Even then, the person who made the bad impression needs to know what that other person needs them to do in order to fix it.