faking it...

you know that feeling when you're fresh out of college and working your first job and truly supporting yourself for the first time and you sometimes wake up in the morning thinking that truly, truly, this life can't be real, that you must actually still be in high school, because you don't really feel much older than that but yet you're somehow living in this grown-up-people world pretending that you're a professional, and you just know that one of these days they're gonna catch on, see that really, you're faking it all, and send you back home...

You know that feeling? yeah? I have a different version of that feeling right now. I've lived on my own and worked full-time for over five years now and that whole thing feels normal to me now, but the job thing.... Sure I can do the full-time gig with the best of them, but now, I'm in a world where the co-workers I hang out with most are the managers of the departments. There are 30 to 40-ish people in the company and the ones I know best are the approximately 8 people at the top. I get along with them best, I talk work strategy and ideas with them, they come to me with questions all the time... I am actually the person they turn to for everything web (what do you know about this? How does that company do that? Can we...?) I answer them, and answer them well, because there's no doubt that I have opinions about web stuff (I call it intuition). But am I RIGHT? Should I REALLY be the person you are asking? There are so many different schools of thought out there, and I have mine and I know quite a few web standards, but there's SO MUCH I don't know... It's cool and weird all at the same time. And there's this part of me that thinks but aren't I still a newbie? fresh out of college newbie who doesn't have a clue? and thinks they'll catch on...

But, I'm not. I look at the kids that are fresh-out-of-college newbies, thank God I'm not still there, and know that I'm right where I'm supposed to be.