Stepford up

As I understand it, “step up” is the possibly now stale, but relatively trendy, term for giving it all. Doing more to show you mean it. Showing your bosses – not superiors, but bosses – that you are willing to stay later, do more, get it done. You’ve been doing fine, but if you want that promotion, you’ll have to step up. Or maybe you’re not doing so well, and you need to step up to stay on the job.

I guess athletes use that term, too. Turning on the afterburners to excel.

So I was cleaning house a few weeks ago and pondering my life (I’d better get a louder vacuum, so I can drown out those thoughts!), and the fitting in conundrum. And the image of the Stepford Wife came to mind – the docile, robotic, matchy-good-attitude-at-all-cost, no individuality allowed, matron of the 1972 novel. (I just Wiki’d the novel and my impression of it was slightly different; my mental picture of the women of that fictional, maybe not so fictional, town had less chauvinism going on, but the analogy still works, I think.)

I frequently war with myself on doing a better job of fitting in vs. doing a better job being honest and proud of the misfit I frequently feel I am. I’ll forever be lost somewhere between being a fifth-grader longing to be cool and the 17-year-old rejecter of popular culture. I feel like I’ve been trying to figure out the lay of the land all my life; a Methodist attending Lutheran school; a ruralite moving to the suburbs; a junior in college starting over at a 4-year university; a Midwesterner tackling the East Coast; on and on. As soon as I get my bearings, I move again. I’d like to say it takes less time to figure out local customs and protocols each time, but I’m beginning to fear that it takes more time with each transition.

So, pondering all these changes and my continued state of being ostracized at work, taking out my frustrations on scrubbing or vacuuming or sorting dirty clothes, somewhere in my unconscious, the term “step up” collided with the Stepford women. Stepford up.

There are times to follow my own drumbeat, and times to quiet mine and listen to others’, and times to suck up all the noise and Stepford Up. I feel that, at work, the latter is the only accepted path. It’s not bad practice, temporarily. It gives me information and cues for when the independent drummer can be set free. But that drumbeat keeps getting louder.