Today was my final work appraisal before confirmation. At first I
was going to drag that out a bit, build some suspense, but I figured to best
write it the way it happened.
“Clarissa, do you have 30 minutes?” Ian asked.
I was emailing Jane from Le Cordon Bleu some of our Food Fight
photos. “Uh…hang on.”
“Okay. I was thinking we could get your last work appraisal done
by today.” That was how he announced it. How he did most things, really. Level
three. Now.
Then Ian left to book a meeting room while I finished up.
The first thing he said once I got there and which kind of set the
tone of the appraisal was this:
“So this is how I’m going to grade you,” he said. In his hand was
the appraisal form with a line chart at the bottom that followed my progression
from the two previous appraisals. The line rose steadily but not steepy from 27
to 28. “I’m going to mark you 29, which is saying a lot because it’s the
highest I’ve ever given anyone. So,” he paused,” your work from now should
reflect that.”
It was kind of like that moment you read about or see in films
when the gruff and aloof father puts his hand on his son’s shoulder and says
‘Good job son’. Even though Ian is neither gruff nor aloof, I keep getting this
feeling like I’m letting him down, or like I’m not doing enough. So I told him
as much.
“That’s good,” he said. “But you handled the Food Fight project
quite well, considering you’re still so new.”
Oh.
“But that just means it’s so speculative.”
“What do you mean?”
I said, “That just means the high scores are, like, just based on
my inexperience and not actual merit. ‘Considering you’re so young’,
‘considering you’re so new’, you know?”
What I did not say was, what if I didn’t live up to the hype? What
if those numbers and his impression born from my “potential” never
materialized?
I was happy, sure, but it felt a lot like celebrating on the edge
of a cliff/ You didn’t want to get too excited.
Ian said something about how in reality, you had to take these
things into consideration, and, and something else. I wasn’t listening. Like I
said, I was happy.
Then came the patty of my compliment – constructive criticism –
compliment burger. He went over the breakdown of my marks, writing down the
justification for why he gave the marks as high, or low, as he did, in the
remarks section.
“The one thing you’re struggling with right now is your writing
skill,” he said.
Did I see this coming? I saw this coming. Of course I did. Most of
what I’ve been churning out for Food Fight was complacent, lazy copy. Still, it
stung to hear him say it, of course it did.
He went on, “You’ve gotten a lot wore than when you were writing
as an intern. Back then, the one thing I could be sure of was your writing. The
other stuff…” he paused, “you were kind of flighty.”
He continued with how he knew it was probably because all my
recent articles were about Food Fight. How he knew it wasn’t easy, that I was
lacking in context and though.
It was all true. Every painful word of it. They say you don’t
remember everything a person has done for you but you will always remember how
they made you feel. I knew right then that I had made him feel disappointed,
even if he didn’t remember what exactly it was I had written to make him feel
that way.
I tried. I really did. I wrote down almost all of the comments he
gave so I could improve my prose. I made it a point not to repeat any of the
mistakes he mentioned – there were so many. It got to the point where I was
just writing for the sake of submitting my text.
The goo moments – those times when I’d pen down a line and go
“Hey, that sounds pretty good” and have no idea where it came from – got less
and less. They would feel like a puzzle piece clicking into place. They weren’t there anymore. I knew what Ian
meant, but I didn’t know what to do about it.
I realize that his thing – the fishing in your word well until you
come up with an amazing spot of clarity – that’s something you can’t learn.
Jerrie once told me that as a photographer, he has to take a
hundred “meh” photos to get a perfect one. But his taking 90% unusable pictures
doesn’t mean that he’s bad. It just means he put in as much effort as his
talent deserved.
So if you’re still reading, take this away with you, if nothing
else: Write down a thousand words, then remove 800 of them. The remaining 200
should be your final copy. If you submit all of what you wrote in your first
draft, it just means you could have done better but you didn’t. I didn’t.
That was my problem. I could have done better. Don’t be like me.
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| Food Fight is R.AGE's search for the next Malaysian food celebrity. You can check it out here: rage.com.my/foodfight |
