I Set My Own Standards

I tweeted recently that I have been feeling minimized by some people in my life, treated as though my ideas were not valuable. This has been on my mind for the last week because of some interactions with colleagues and coworkers, and some of my friends have helped me think with clarity about my experience, so I think I'd like to write a little of this out today. In the first place, because I think many of my friends (and certainly my graduate students) in the academy have experienced similar feelings and, in the second place, because in some ways, I have found productive ways of moving past those feelings that others may find helpful.

The story is this:
I have a colleague who always treats me as though I'm a pretty face. Whenever I talk to this person I  feel slightly tolerated or looked down on. This person likes me, certainly, is happy to see me, we get along, etc. But when I am around, this person never fails to, for example, interrupt me when I am talking in order to say how cute I am or (this happened) call to me from across the room at a conference with the phrase "you're so hot". These are compliments, of course, or are largely intended as such. But the context in which these compliments are given is always a professional one, right? So they are compliments given out of context. I don't really want to be hot or cute in a professional setting, and each time this happens, it feels as though there is also a concomitant dismissal of me as a scholar. Something like "thank goodness we can at least look at him because he doesn't have anything to say" or like a man using the phrase "little lady" to speak down to a woman.

I talked with a friend about this and he wondered why this person had any power over me at all. "How interesting", he said, "that you let this person get to you".

The thing is that this person actually has no power over me. But this treatment taps into two larger sets of feelings. One is the general fear that many academics have that all of their ideas are dumb, and that they have nothing important to say. This very well may be true, and most of us worry that it is true a lot of the time. The other is a more general infantilization or condescension that I often feel where I work because of the way faculty who outrank me talk to me. I won't detail any stories about this, but suffice it to say that frequently faculty members with higher ranks will treat me as though I simply do not and cannot understand the particular problem we're discussing because of my age. Not everyone who outranks me does this, of course, but it does happen frequently. (Also, can we just note that I am not young? I'm younger, certainly, than some of my colleagues, but no spring chicken.)

How I Deal with This

In many ways, these feelings are basic to being a younger person in any field – inadequacy, stupidity, lack of seriousness – and the way I have dealt with these feelings is to set standards for myself that are different from those that others have for me. I have worked hard to develop personal standards and goals that are not attached to the people closest to me – my parents, my major professors from graduate school, and my colleagues at work. In other words, the first places I always look for approval are outside of my immediate circles.

Let me use writing as an example. I made very specific goals for myself in regard to which places I want to be published, what kind of writing I want to do, how many pieces I want out in the world, and when I want them done. These are personal goals, and I purposefully shifted them so that they were different from the goals of my colleagues, my College, my parents, and my professors from graduate school. In this way I separated what I want from what other people wanted of me. This might seem scary or dangerous when we think about tenure – about making sure that our work is legible for the other folks in our department or college or whatever, but I have found that my own goals and standards are actually much higher than my college's goals or standards. From the start of my career I have aimed at getting tenure not at the place where I worked but at a place where the requirements for tenure are much higher. This isn't because I wanted to leave my job; it was a way of shifting my standards so that I didn't feel as though I was working on someone else's timeline or for someone else's goals.

This means that my chief fear about not reaching one of my goals is never that I might let someone else down but rather that I might let myself down. My motivation for not letting myself down is very different than it is when I'm using other people as motivation. I am both more strict with myself and more generous with myself, and I also remove the wonder out of the equation. Are my parents, teachers, colleagues proud of me? Impressed with me? If I ask those questions I can never really trust or know the answer. If I ask those questions of myself I always can.

This is why it is important that these goals be concrete and achievable. It is important that goals are not nebulous. Other people's goals for us are nebulous. Our goals for ourselves must be graspable. We must know what achieving them looks like so that we can recognize (and celebrate) when we've achieved them.

I suppose I have more to say about all of this – and perhaps when I think of other things, I will write them here, but for now I think it is important to say that the fact that I have achieved a great many of my goals, that I have attained a position in my field of which I feel proud, doesn't stop me from occasionally feeling minimized or infantilized by those people in my life who treat me that way. But because I have my own goals, my own standards against which to measure my success, all it took was a little reminder from a friend that I am doing what I set out to do, and I was able to dismiss those feelings of inadequacy. In fact, because I set my own standards, I was able, mentally, to move quickly to a place where I recognize those other people's treatment of me as reflective of their own inadequacies and not about me at all.