I don’t belong here. They might as well ask me to leave, that’s how obvious it is that I’m an outsider in this arrangement. They must know. I’m not a scholar. I’m not a big-picture thinker. I’m not filling the role that this place at the table requires.

These were just some of the ridiculously insecure thoughts that were running through my head as I sat silently through a three-hour seminar tonight. I tracked the discussion as everyone around the room had something to contribute, until it was only me and the girl sitting next to me who hadn’t spoke. When having something to say is a percentage of your grade, and you are graded on the quality of what you actually articulate, staying in that silent minority is not an option.

Grad school has shown me that leading a group discussion is one of my major weaknesses. The two times I’ve had to do it in previous classes, I have totally bombed. My failure was so complete that I thought my best course of action would be to admit failure and ask the professor for feedback on how I could improve. It helped redeem my participation score somewhat, but the feedback didn’t actually improve my conversation facilitation skills.

But on the other hand, classes have also shown me that saying something, anything, in a room full of highly intellectual people carries the potential to make a point. So, even though I couldn’t quote the rhetoricians of the 19th and 20th centuries, I was able to understand enough to blurt out a coherent statement and thus somewhat contribute to the discussion.

Class isn’t the only place I’m running into insecurity, though. It’s the most obvious, because it’s the most different from what had become my day-to-day routine. But at work, I’m dealing with insecure coworkers. It’s been interesting to observe how insecurity manifests itself. For me, I tend to be incredibly quiet, building up courage to blurt out that one desperate statement. At work, it’s being asked “Did I do okay?” or on the other hand being told by a coworker “I did a really good job on this project,” only to have to affirm that statement because it’s just so damn awkward. Or, I’m being asked by another coworker “Are you mad at me?” in a lovable way, but still so frequently that I have to wonder if I come off as a raging bitch sometimes.

What do you think of insecure people? Having worked with a few in my short career, my reaction tends to be sympathy first, followed by confusion (seriously, this person has no business being insecure), followed by annoyance at the extreme high-maintenance of the situation. But, as I start to experience these feelings of insecurity myself, I’m super conscious of how I come across to other people because I’ve hit the annoyance stage with my coworkers.

So, I set limits. For instance, before class I was ok confessing that most of the reading was completely over my head. And my classmates reassured me that the only reason they understood it was because they had taken a similar class before and it had all be over their heads during that first class, too. But, I WON’T whine, “You know, I just didn’t get it” when it comes my turn to speak, and I won’t ask everyone else to affirm that “This stuff is really hard, right?”

The bottom line, I guess, is that it’s ok to be a little insecure when starting new things or reaching new chapters of your life. On the other hand, if you are chronically insecure, maybe it’s time to look at what you’re doing and decide if you really should be in a role that you suspect you may fail or suck at. If you don’t have the confidence that you’ll do the job, the nice coworkers will try to build you up and share their confidence that you can — honest ones or ones who have hit their reassurance quota will have no choice but to watch you tear yourself down with doubt.