What should die inside me so that I might truly live?

Small group on Sunday was absolutely incredible.  We did a set on Easter via San Jose UU’s Small Group website (a wonderful resource.  I’d be lost without it!)  The first question was something to the affect of “What should die inside me so that I might truly live?”

It took a bit, but I came up with an answer.  I feel like I need to have all the answers.  To everything.  This plays itself out in a couple of ways

1) Work.  If a kid comes with some obscure chemistry question or a calculus question I haven’t seen in 5 years, and I don’t know how to do it and can’t figure it out, I leave work in an absolutely horrible mood. I feel stupid.  I feel extremely stupid.  My friends and coworkers can attest to this.  Its been made very clear to me by all of my bosses that I am not expected to know the answer to everything – I’m taking this on myself.  I feel like if I don’t know it, then I’m doing a bad job, and I don’t want to do a job if I’m bad at it.

2) Life.  I feel like I should know the answers to life’s big questions.  Why are we here?  How’d we get here?  Where am I going in life?  What will I do for the rest of my life?  I don’t know any of the answers, and its a source of anxiety for me.  I feel like I ought to know these by now, and I don’t, so there must be something wrong with me.  Yes, I know that it’s silly to think I should have all the answers, since no one ever has, but just because my brain knows it doesn’t mean my mind/soul/heart does.

I think part of where this comes from is that I was one of the smart kids in school.  I always “got it” even though sometimes I had to work my ass off to get it.   But now there’s no textbook to study for life’s questions, and it’s impossible for me to know everything about every single academic subject (if I did, I doubt I would be a tutor after all.)  I needed to have a lot of answers growing up as well.  After my dad died, my mom and sister fought all the time, and I was thrust into a situation where I was expected to have the answer and compromise that would pacify both of them and get them talking to each other again.

I need to work on killing this off so that I can be reborn in the Easter spirit.  I spend a lot of time worrying about not having all of the answers and it’s one of the many sources of my low self-esteem.  I might be missing out on life (or maybe this is life….I don’t know and that aggravates me.)