Stage Fright

I’ve always been pretty good at taking notes. If there was an award for the most photocopied notebooks in school, I would most certainly get it. This was partly due to my obsessive need for record keeping and partly because my school was the sort where I was unlikely to find anybody else who bothered to bring a notebook at all.

As a Master’s student with no background in economics, I make notes that are too detailed even by my standards. I rationalise this to myself by arguing that what is obvious to people who have already studied economics for three years is not obvious at all to me. But lately I’ve been suffering from stage fright because of all the photocopying my registers undergo. I’m very acutely aware of the fact that everything I write will be read by people other than me so I try to sound more authoritative, I double-check my grammar, I avoid scribbling in the margins like I would otherwise. Self-censorship. It makes me quite uncomfortable and I only find solace in the fact that I’m not writing anything even mildly interesting anyway.

Any prospective employers finding my blog would be bad news for me. My posts put together suggest that I’m awful at making decisions and interpret theories as I please but I have a pretty handwriting and I’m good at taking notes. I would almost certainly wind up as a secretary.