I start my internship at The Paley Center for Media tomorrow and I am getting a wee bit nervous. It was not until this past Friday that I realized I would be starting back at a 40-hour week come tomorrow. Three days a week at Paley and two days a week at NYU’s archive/study center. I suppose God figured I would only be able to handle three days with this knowledge or else I may have figured it out a couple months ago when Paley informed me I had the internship and I also agreed to work for NYU this summer. Either way, the anxiety is there.
I have worked a 40-hour week before. I did it for over seven years, minus the three years when I was cut back to a 32-hour week. But the life of a student is different. In many regards, it is more lax, more in my control. I do homework when I want. I choose when I want to show up to class (which, for me, is all the time unless deathly ill). And on the days I am at school for 12-hours straight, it never feels that way. There are several breaks, the activities vary, and nothing I do is strenuous. It sure beats sitting at a computer for 8 hours and typing up bills of lading or emailing back and forth with customers.
That said, I doubt the internship will be taxing and I know the tasks I have at NYU won’t be. Plus, I will get to come home and have NOTHING to do – no homework, no lingering work issues, NOTHING. It really is all about the control. I must be somewhere from 9:00am to 5:00pm each and every day. I am not just accountable to myself as I have been the past 9 months; I am accountable to an institution. Yes, NYU is an institution, but for some reason The Paley Center feels more so. Probably from the pressure I am putting on myself and this job. Pressure to make something of this position, to secure a job after college, or at least figure out if what I do at Paley is something I want to do for the rest of my life. Black and white thinking is what I succeed in.
So why don’t I let that go here? Expectations get me in trouble. Expectations lead to disappointment. And expectations obviously lead to anxiety. I can get used to a 40-hour week again and, as both of my parents assured me, I will enjoy it because I like to have a regular schedule. When I worked a 32-hour week, I often found myself bored and with nothing to do every Monday. I just need to make sure I show up tomorrow at 10:30am dressed in business casual (blah!) and open to learning what my job is. I have this underlying fear the internship won’t work out and I will have to decline it, but I always get that fear when I tell a lot of people about something going on in my future life. It is the fear of disappointment, of having to go back to all those people and telling them I actually don’t have that internship. And that is another expectation to let go of.
My fears are always 100 times worse than what actually happens. I bet you anything I get there Monday, they show me around, plop me down at a desk, teach me how to catalog, and leave me be for the rest of my days. The life of an intern – stashed in a corner and forgotten about. Oops, there go those expectations again. But I like working on my own, so that one doesn’t seem half bad. Anyway, today I don’t have work. Today I hopefully will be spending my time in the theater district, enjoying a play and the sunny weather. Tomorrow will still be waiting for me when the day is over.
And PS – no, the photograph has nothing to do with this post, but I took it at a street fair last weekend and thought it was both hilarious and disgusting at the same time. Fried oreos? And this was not the only stand selling them. I guess I shouldn’t knock them until I try them, which will hopefully be never.