Mixed feelings about my first job fresh out of college

In my last year of graduation, I joined Enterprise India Fellowship that came with the same things I wanted: mentors, community and working on different projects. After ten months of being a partner, I came across an opportunity to be a team member, and I applied for it. Now it’s been two weeks that I am part of the Enterprise Team, and it’s my first full-time job after college. There are some mixed feelings inside me that have been going on due to things happening in- around work and home. 

As soon as I started the job, I got pushed into this roller coaster of emotions. Though I have self-doubt I still feel that they see something in me which has made me challenge this self-deprecating approach giving me the confidence of being a team member. With job responsibilities comes expectation, where even making a graphic makes me question myself from time to time “am I doing it right?”. Now it makes me feel like a hypocrite and overthinking kicks in.

When it comes to ideating and running my work the question pops again “will I be able to do it??”. This leads to the constant need for feedback but while I am executing others’ ideas this feeling goes away.

A few days ago I poured my heart out to one of my mentors, we spoke about family business being shut down, sleepless nights because of my grandma being bed-ridden and things kept getting tough which has gone to a level of making things fall apart with this it is leading to thoughts like what if I am not able to do my job correctly, what if I fail? There will be a lot of tolls to be taken by the family. 

The cluster of emotions was shaken when my mentor suggested to start supporting my family financially. Due to this, I am facing a dilemma whether to start work on nature to fine-tune my skills or fight for food. I have my father’s support for the choices I am making for myself but I don’t want his financial support as I want to do it on my own. Again the feeling of self-doubt comes into the picture where even I can’t trust myself for achieving short term goals which result in not having motivation or even discipline.

With these mixed emotions, I have started to practice these 3 habits i.e. Being more communicative with my team members as in the past: the miscommunication created an unpleasant situation, listening to podcasts of Prakhar ke Pravachan, Shwetabh Gangwar, Joe Rogan have helped me to stay calm and to somewhere understand how humans behave or the game of life and watching documentaries, playing the guitar, sketching have helped me to be sorted and realise there is more to the work.

As a youngster who has been experiencing a roller coaster of mixed emotions though I realised it’s different in the world as I am getting out of college. I am happy that I know about my flaws but my hunger to work on them is not as much as the feeling of self-doubt as I think it requires a long term commitment and also not being able to look at my qualities and the skills that I have, even though I have been working on some projects with a team. My team appreciates me even for small wins but I am not able to look at me through the same set of eyes. I want to get out of my self-doubt to appreciate myself even if it is for small wins and to present my ideas or work without any hesitation.