I wrote this post earlier in the year, then didn’t publish it because it felt like I was drowning in self pity, but recently I accidentally showed it during a presentation, so I thought I would put it out there… So here goes…
I dislike writing this because I lead a charmed life compared to many people, this is very much “First World Problems”, but we are half way through the year and I’m already thinking I’m cursed…
Work
Work is proving extremely challenging for me. I like to be good at stuff, but more importantly I hate being bad at stuff. At the moment I’m doing so many different things at work I feel like my day is a massive pile of mediocrity, and that is really hard on my ego.
I’m in no different a position to many DBAs and developers out there, Googling my way through life, but it’s really quite depressing. The counter to this is I can’t imagine ever being so blinkered as I used to be, back in the days when I considered myself as just an “Oracle specialist”.
This is where the difficulty lies. I don’t see a way forward that I will be happy with. These types of situation where every option comes with a set of bad outcomes fry my brain…
Conferences
There is just something that is not clicking into place for me right now. It’s not a criticism of the events or the people, it’s something to do with me. I’m really daunted in the lead up to the events and although I enjoy the events themselves and interacting with people, I come away with a massive sense of relief when they are over, and then have a bad post-event crash where I just want to stop everything and give up. The post-event crash is not a new thing, but the peaks and troughs seem more exaggerated than before.
It doesn’t matter how much prep I do, it never seems to be enough. I’ve been doing this for over 10 years and I can’t remember feeling this way before. I don’t think it’s anything to do with impostor syndrome, as that has always been there and I came to terms with it a long time ago. People who think they are great are probably too rubbish to realise how much they don’t know. 🙂 I suspect there are a number of factors feeding into this.
Oracle user group conferences are much easier for me, but over the last year I’ve been doing more events that aren’t straight Oracle events, where you don’t have a good handle on the audience before you get there. As a result these events are a lot more daunting for me. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don’t. I guess it plays into my insecurities about presenting…
Part of the Dev Champion program is about taking you out of your comfort zone. It’s certainly done this, and I know it’s probably good for me, but it doesn’t always feel like it. 🙂
Website
Over the years the website has been the one thing I can always count on to get me out of a funk. I sit down, play with technology and write. Some of it becomes articles. Some of it gets lost in the midst of time. Either way I’ve always felt like I’m having fun when I’m doing it. It doesn’t feel like that at the moment though. The pressure of other stuff encroaching on my time means this is suffering, which in turn makes me put pressure on myself to deliver, which stops it feeling like fun…
Conclusion
So there it is. I’m having a midlife crisis. I have no plan regarding how to fix it, but convention tells me I should go out with a 19 year old gold digger (sorry Debra), buy a drop-top car and/or a motorbike and generally try to act like I’m 20, so people can discuss how sad my behaviour is and laugh about me behind my back… I’m off to do some test drives and install Tinder on my phone…
Cheers
Tim…
PS. Since writing this, but before posting it, I’ve had a conference where things have worked out OK, so I’m hoping my mindset and luck are changing…
PPS. A couple of people encouraged me to release this, because they thought it would be good for people to hear that experienced presenters have all the same problems as newbies. That is definitely true…