My built in guilt meter and MIT

I guess I have to mention in every second post that no spam has ever been sent out by Courting Destiny. I’m still getting returned mass emails.

I forgot to mention in this post that lying begins at the top. Bush lied about WMD’s. Has there been an impeachment hearing? Isn’t that a bit more important than lying about sex? We condone lying when it’s convenient or expedient and condemn it when it offends our morals. Therefore I can’t condone lying at all.

Dari, a new blog friend, has a son in Iraq. She’s one hot momma. See her in her IMPEACH BUSH tee shirt. I did used to throw in IMPEACH BUSH into every post, but then the IMPEACH BUSH coalition was formed

Here’s a link to
Liz’s article. It’s very beautiful.
Bone wrote a wonderful 3WW

“Holding integrity is sometimes very hard to do because the temptation may be to cheat or cut corners,” it says. “But just remember that ‘what goes around comes around,’ meaning that life has a funny way of giving back what you put out.”

It damn well better.

The Dean of Admissions at MIT admitted to fabricating her credentials when she first had a low level job at the MIT admissions office in 1979, and whenever promoted to the next job then the next was too ashamed to say anything.

She has a book out on not stressing about being admitted to college. She should know.

Marilee Jone’s deception has made me spend the past five hours wondering about “worth” and am I really worthy or not.

It brought back the “I am a fraud” feelings.

I hope that MIT prosecutes Jones to the full extent the law allows. I hope Oprah doesn’t invite her into her show. She lived a lie for 28 years. I don’t care if she claims to have felt guilt.

Real guilt would have stopped her from writing her book. It would have alerted her to the fact that people probably knew she was perpetuating a fraud.

It would have kept her awake nights. It might even have caused her to confess, at a time in her career, when she wasn’t the Director. If MIT liked her so much they might have sent her to school to get a degree. There are always truthful options.

It doesn’t matter how good she was at her job, how many people she helped or what she achieved. Her entire career is based on lying.

She committed a true crime. She also took jobs from people who earned them because they spent many years studying and doing the prep work.

She couldn’t even keep the schools she was supposed to have gone to straight. If she felt true guilt she would have remembered which one she was supposed to have gone to. She had so much faith in her ability not to be discovered as a real fraud, she didn’t even try to remember.

Jones claimed to have been a scientist by training. I find that mind boggling. She invented an entire back story.

I know what it feels like to feel guilty and to have done absolutely nothing wrong. It can be paralyzing, and was for too many years in my case.

For years I dreamed that I fabricated my undergrad degree.
I graduated college in 1976. The next year I got a job coding documents on the phone company divestiture case. I was promoted to supervisor and every damn afternoon would hold my breath waiting for bounced forms. Every afternoon I would hear “nothing for you, Pia!” and I would breath until the next day.

One of my best friends, and former supervisor at that job went to grad school as soon as the job ended. Her internship, a movie studio, offered her a VP job immediately, she was that good.

What did we have in common? A lot of things, but for this, we both thought we were frauds. We belonged to that generation of women who couldn’t accept or believe how good we were.

Feeling like a fraud was a commonality among many baby boomer women. When somebody from my generation, in a work situation that wouldn’t be unfamiliar to us, is really a fraud, it rankles a lot.

This made me remember the damn nightmares where I didn’t really have a college degree or had to give it back. They stopped when I went to grad school.

I did fail a lie detector test three weeks before they became illegal for pre-employment for admitting to something I never did.

My guilt over everything and anything is legendary among my friends and family. This now sadly includes my blogging friends.

When I failed the lie detector test, all anybody could do, including my parents, was laugh because it was so typical of me.

Our society usually condones acts, such as the one Marilee Jones did, for its chutzpah. She will probably get offers to be on every TV show, frigging repent, and write a tearful but lesson filled memoir.

She just doesn’t deserve to get that type of media attention or to get attention at all. Except negative attention.

I have a friend who stated on her job application that she had a college degree, as it was a requirement for her job. Two years later she went to her boss and confessed. She subsequently did get promotions based on her work performance. She felt she couldn’t remain at her job unless she told the truth and I admire that.

It’s hard to live in this society and have a built in guilt meter. I never feel that I deserve things that I’m actually technically over qualified for. I have always believed that there are three acceptable lies: sex, age and screenname. And the little white ones you have to say, “no, really your bathroom didn’t stink.” If you don’t people will think you horribly mannered.

I have never played off my professional writing credentials. I actually do have two overfilled books with clips. Did I deserve to have two clipping books?

Well, uh, the cover story that I found, reported, researched and more, oh it was a good story and anybody willing to give up six weeks and at least two nights of sleep could have done it.

But I did it. It was multi-award nominated. Pretty good for a person who had been a reporter for less than a year. But really the subject was so fascinating….Did it ever occur to me that it might have been the way I told the story that made it even more interesting? Hell no.

Fortunately I became tired of always feeling guilty, and feeling like a fraud. I have been working on a memoir for way too long, and finally realized what the stumbling block was. It had nothing to do with my being non-linear, my stupid problems which I have been overly honest about or an inability to wrote a cohesive narrative or anything like that.

There were two stumbling blocks. Who am I to think that my life is memoir worthy? Who am I to write about my dead father’s friends and clients, and my own?

When I decided to turn it into fiction it began to flow. I was thinking of installing a count down clock to Memorial Day as I hope to have a complete, good first draft done by then. No excuses, no “I’m not good enough,” no rationale about why other people deserve more than I do.

My mother always said that I was my own worst enemy. I can hear her now. My father regretted trying to make me “perfect.” He also understood that he had helped make me into the least competitive person in the world.

He did this by both by always pointing out my imperfections and insisting that I understand that most people didn’t have the material things I had. Many of the individuals he pointed out have way more material goods than I have now.

In today’s society people can’t afford to put others over them. People can’t afford to have a built in guilt meter. It gets you nowhere. I hope that no woman who came after us ever felt like a fraud.

It took me too many years to understand that I’m worthy of success. It was never fear of success or fear of failing or any psychobabble that stood in my way. It was my innate feeling that I just wasn’t good enough. That I wasn’t worthy of good things. That I was a fraud.

I happen to believe that we make too much of degrees. Many jobs just require intelligence and common sense as Jones prove. I’m not a rules girl by any stretch of the imagination. But there are certain societal rules you don’t break because when you break them, you show disdain for people who played by the rules. Degrees should be earned. If the requirement for a job is to have that degree or degrees, you can’t pretend. That’s unethical.

I hope we have been Parised, and Freyed enough that we become a society that admires earned success. That we become a society where real values are admired, respected and emulated. Until then we deserve the government that we have.

If we are to become the great country we say we are, we damn well better get our values in order.

We are the country that impeached a president for lying over a blow job. There’s a big difference between lying over sex and lying about having degrees.

Especially when in a position like Marilee Jone’s. It’s more than a bit ironic she lied to work in admissions and ended up as admissions director. She’s a woman who was in a position to admit or reject many people each year.

I can see the lawsuits now from people who were rejected by MIT. How do they know that they were rejected fairly? Getting into a school like MIT is almost impossible for most. To be rejected by a woman with a high school education who lied about her degrees could be seen as comical. It’s not.

I hope that people who grew up in the generations after mine have no idea what I’m talking about when I say I thought I was a fraud every work day of my life for years. I was always waiting to be discovered for the fraud I thought I was. Eventually I realized that if my work was called “outstanding” it really must have been. When I changed careers completely it brought back the unworthy fraud feelings

Never ever feel that you’re not good enough. Never feel that you’re a fraud passing for a success. Leave that to the Marilee Jones’s of the world. Wow, did she cheat and cut corners. I hope karma is true. I hope what goes around….

I had turned comments off as I this post is so personal it almost feels as if I’m standing in front of people without any clothes on.

I didn’t want comments telling me I’m not a fraud or not worthy. I turned them back on. I still don’t like that type of comment. I do delete comments that tell me I’m immoral or are otherwise rude or crude.

I just spoke to my sister who couldn’t stop laughing when I told her I wrote about my giving back my degree nightmares. I have never felt that way about my grad degree. Probably because I paid for it myself, and spent two years working with single minded determination.

I only went to one grad school as opposed to three undergrad schools. I was mature, and ready. But it doesn’t matter that it took me eight years on and off to finish undergrad school, and that my father paid for it. I earned the degree.

I can not believe that Marilee Jones took me back to feelings I had forgotten.