Glee
Work is sucking up most of my brain right now. We launched! I have to make things happen! Suddenly my phone is ringing off the hook! It’s gift guide season and the PR people are after me!
I’m having a blast. Yes there are daily frustrations, not least of which include being rusty and being exposed all the time. But hey! This is the job I thought I would be doing a year ago! And it’s fun! Right now!
I can predict that eventually it won’t be for various reasons but right now there is nowhere I would rather be. I’m learning a ton working with EditorInChief and I’m just… happy there. If constantly freaking out. On my team right now, constantly freaking out is just taken as a sign that I am one of the gang. It’s nice.
However, having screened four episodes of Ugly Betty last week (purchased as I knew it might get tense as we launched), I do have to say that my workplace has some similarities. And I am the fattest person on either of my teams by about, oh, 3-4 dress sizes. (And I’m a 12. 14. 12. Depends on the cut. Next up: getting to the gym!)
I have to crow about one little professional achievement. Not the measurable kind. But it is this:
I have finally, genuinely, learned to handle - even enjoy - critique.
A few times in the last year, and about a million times in the last two weeks as everything I’ve quietly done for months suddenly is public, I have run up against people in my new company who have, gasp, shock and horror, not thought that all of my prose was deathless, facts were amazingly accurate, arguments exceedingly well rendered, and ideas stellar. No to mention my occasional erratic lack of adherence to my own style guide.
And quite a lot of the time, I shudder to express, they have been right. There was one case where I wrote a funny little piece, shared it with people who also thought it was funny, passed it on to EIC, and she thought it sucked ass, for example.
Not to put too fine a point on it. In retrospect… it was in between, but it was her right to kill it.
And although sometimes I disagree, and occasionally I feel red-faced or stupid, the one thing I have come to realize and embrace is that I don’t need to get wrapped up in the individual pieces/arguments/sentences/phrases. It makes me a thousandfold better editor and writer to approach it openly and thoughtfully and calmly and appreciatively, than it does to be perfect in the first place.
No, really. Because if I were perfect in the first place, I wouldn’t be, if you know what I mean.
Anyways I’ve known this theoretically for at least 5 years. But the last few months I’ve found my first reaction is getting to be appreciation and thought. With the occasional side of consternation of course. As one example, when I get copy edited material back with questions and corrections, I actually think “wow, she did a great job” rather than “I am so embarassed and wait, I like my comma there.”
It is so much easier this way. I wish I could go back in my life and learn this earlier, perhaps even be raised in an environment where mistakes were okay and feedback not fraught. This is the process. Sometimes, I explain something and I “win.” Sometimes, I “lose.” But actually, wait for it - it’s all winning!
Not only is this making my daily life less stressful and my end product better, but I’ve come to realize that the real professionals in the building take that calm willingness as a sign of true mastery. So it makes me look good!
Anyways, it’s good days. Crazy-busy-stressy days. But good.
All will be revealed in time. *
* And why no, I didn’t read this over or revise it. Are you kidding? This is where I get to write badly spelled, poorly expressed stuff WHENEVER I WANT. ‘Cause I still like that too. :)
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:-))))))))
Glee, in web-speak.
*sigh*
Um, it’s odd how I treat you as a star sign column in some ways in that when I’m feeling anxious or uncertain about something specific, I’ll visit you, just to see what you’re up to (peer) and what’s odd is that you almost always have something to say to me that is not important to you but helps me anyway.
For that (accidental?) service I thank you.
you sound well, that’s always good.
life here is also good
thanks for being you, and being here.
love from polly (just jo, thea, shell, viola…)
*beams*
correction: not “consciously, necessarily” important to you
oops