Fat Kid Syndrome
I have SO MUCH WORK TO DO tonight it isn’t funny. I’ve been trying to leave every night between 7 and 7:30, so it’s my own fault for not just moving in and burning myself out more.
Sometimes I assume everyone knows what’s running through my head; other times I say it.
I often think it’s the little things that drive me crazy. The “oh hey we should all do lunch tomorrow” and everyone does lunch without you.
But they become the big things. Rather, when you have no control over the big things, the little ones can drive you BATSHIT.
Or like another time when they said let’s meet for lunch and they all met outside and nobody thought that information would be relevant to me.
Not that I get lunch out more than once a month anyway. But still.
And I know people have their favorites. Like, when three of you are in a room and one can only look at the other person even when I am trying to impart my wisdomy pearls, I notice these things.
I often dismiss it as the other person just being clueless. I also often entertain whether they DO know what they’re doing, because I’m all too familiar with those kinds of intentional antics.
And today as I was looking up passages about suffering fools gladly, the phrase “Fat Kid Syndrome” rained down on me. That is, the expectation that everyone should love me because I’m the smartest person in the room. But the understanding, as it were, that nobody gives a shit whether you live or die if you’re not the skinniest person in the room.
Today one of my boys was mad at me because I didn’t rush his 20,000 word project out the door within an hour of receiving it. Between editing, proofing, layout, design, photo editing and posting to the Web (all me, baby), it took a little while WHAT WITH OTHER FULL-TIME-PLUS work.
So OK fine, judge me on my performance there. It was a communication snafu, anyway, assuming that because I regularly pull off miracles that I had an extra miracle in me this week. That’s not Syndrome-related.
But feeling like if someone else would have done the same thing — or worse, as I’ve seen myriad times — and not heard a blessed peep about it, that’s the Syndrome in action.
I’m not saying I’m suffering it directly. But every time someone prefers someone else’s company or opinion or face to look at, whether in a group of friends or colleagues, there’s always that tiny voice that wonders … if I just looked different … would they recognize that I am freaking amazing?
Or do they realize it and prefer to ignore it, whatever excuse makes the most sense to them, whether it’s disapproval of size or fear of not measuring up if my measurements were different?
And will I ever shake it, no matter how many pounds I lose?