I was talking about work, and was explaining that google sheets has like half the functionality of excel but we have to use it on this project bc it's a collaborative document and smartsheet has a 5k line limit

and stan chimes in like "you're finally sounding as smart as you actually are!"

and I know that it was genuinely meant as a, like... teasing compliment, but boy did that rub me the wrong way

pretty much my whole life I did really shitty in school so I got a lot of "you're so smart so why can't you just do better"

like, sorry all the other shit I talk about makes me sound stupid, guess I'll just go fuck myself

(what do I normally talk about? video games, anime, conventions, which are not academic or professional pursuits and therefore are inherently less worthwhile and make me sound like a plebeian, or something)

(cons are half an exception bc I sell stuff there so it's a business venture but I don't to get to talk about cons in any capacity except for Business)

my family is so... hilariously entrenched in either academia (mom, colin, rachel, becca) or Your Worth As A Human Depends On Your Work Output (stan) that there's no room for me to ever discuss my interests without getting the smile-and-nod

and now that I have a job, now I sound smart

now I am living up to my potential as a person

I mean like. yeah, it's fun to be able to talk about work and throw in a bunch of buzzword-sounding shit and actually know what I'm talking about, but

that really offended me

just like, the implication that when I talk about anything that isn't, like. spreadsheets, it isn't intelligent conversation??

jesus

the problem with my parents is always that... they love me, and they genuinely want me to be happy, and legitimately never mean to insult me or anything

on my mom's part the gaslighting etc is 100% habitual and I don't think she realizes she does it and I don't think she's ever going to change

so it's really hard to bring things up and say "hey that hurt my feelings"

because all of this... absolute garbage is somehow still coming from a well-intentioned place

yeah that's not right :c idk you've been working really hard as far as certification/jobs go for a long time and you shouldn't have to be employed or at least employed in a specific way to "sound" intelligent

even when I started school and started telling them about how I was doing really well there I got "see, I always knew you were smart!"

yes, I have always been smart, and succeeding academically doesn't prove it unequivocally

like, they just literally don't understand any other metrics of success or value

my parents (mom and dad, not stan) both have PhDs, my brother has his PhD now, rachel and becca are both working as teachers (though I don't know if either of them are pursuing graduate degrees)

so they all met the Academic Requirements

stan has a BFA, I think? but he like, used to own his own company that he built with his own hands and shit and he places a really absurd amount of value in working yourself to death

or used to, he knows now that working yourself literally to death is bad but he's very much a YOU NEED TO SUFFER AND BOOTSTRAPS AND WORK IS PAIN kind of guy

and god knows I didn't do any of that shit

but that's like... what they talk about, that's what they do, there's no room in their collective world for me talking about video games or anything else that interests me because it's not Smart Enough

but now that I can say "I'm on a team to streamline product publishing and ease the data migration between lumens and ydesign by finding errors in our SKU lists and we're working collaboratively with the walnut creek office to correct approximately 28k SKUs and are monitoring our progress daily"

now I have a seat at the table

comes back to this bc I thought of something else

even though now I am Talking Like The Smart Person I Am they also still don't really seem to be interested in like... listening to me explain what it is that I do

they're content to listen to me talk the talk but later I was like "I'll tell you about what exactly I do sometime" and was met with the kind of laugh my mom does when she's like "ha ha yeah I don't think so"

like... to be fair my mom hates spreadsheets and like, working with data etc, so probably she isn't too interested in learning the specifics of essentially a data entry job

but like... nobody has asked me what my job entails

nobody has asked me anything about my company or what I do exactly

because even though it's a worthwhile professional thing it's still like, outside their purview