Journey vs. Destination

Off with his head!

Well, that too. More importantly, in the Red Queen’s race in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the Red Queen said,

It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

I feel that way. I don’t mind that the pace of technology goes on, I like to learn new things. And since my specialization is generally a growing field, the stuff I know is valuable and stays that way. It is everything else that makes me worry about the speed of my treadmill.

Everything else in this case is probably Twitter. I have a serious love/hate relationship with Twitter. It is mostly hate though. I feel like I don’t get it. Maybe everyone else gets something better out of the so-called Twitterverse than I do. What I seem to find looking at my Twitter feed is that I’m never, ever doing enough.

I want to go to the RobotGrrl’s robot parties but I never make it. I want to go to the IEEE talks on open source robots or Bluetooth or medical technology but when 7:30pm rolls around I’m happy on the couch with a book and can of champagne. I see people giving talks all the time. Developers promoting their spiffy new app or building an awesome gadget in their free time. Folks traveling to China or France or Africa. I see hackathons and meetups. New books for technologies I’ve never heard of, or worse, books on programming languages or techniques that I want to read but can’t make myself get the oomph.

Everyone has something going on all the time. Twitter is like an endless desert of billboards, each promoting some person doing something fantastic. It makes me think that my billboards are not enough, that I can’t ever keep up.

Part of me knows this is ridiculous. I wrote a book, I have a couple patents, I have a small but reasonably successful company, I am very good at what I do and I get things done. I contribute to a women-in-tech blog and I co-host a lunch every other week for entrepreneurs (specifically women but we’ve never limited it, just failed to invite any men). I occasionally volunteer to talk to classrooms and almost always get invited back. I do conference presentations a couple times a year. I’m a good friend to at least five people. I’m a good wife to one and only one person. My pets are happy, my house is complimented often and my neighbors cheerfully say hello. My cooking isn’t excellent but I bake a mean cookie and awesome pizza. I exercise regularly, occasionally enthusiastically. I’m going on an epic road trip soon.

For the most part, I’m quite happy. But I get the idea that I’m falling behind because everyone is doing something more. I know it is an illusion but that doesn’t stop it from stinging sometimes.  Maybe I should just follow @horse_ebooks and @uberfacts instead of all the amazing people going out there and doing things.

Part of succeeding at a race is knowing where the finish line is… where is the destination? In the Twitter race, there isn’t one. And if there was, it wouldn’t be only one but a multitude of destinations. I know better than to compare myself to strangers but there is something about Twitter that brings out my impostor syndrome.