Ilana Jacqueline

A lot of the time working from home can mean working alone. So on the rare occasion I have to step out of my yoga pants and into a business meeting my frame of mind is generally something like this:

What do real people wear when they congregate in front of a projector to view PowerPoint slides? What if they wear suits and ties and pencil skirts? I’m underdressed. But wait—what if I show up in a pencil skirt and they’re all wearing jeans? I’ll look overexcited and stuck up!

At this point, half my closet is on my bedroom floor and I’m still in my yoga pants and my Your Body is a Wonderland t-shirt.

What if they can sense I’m a home-worker? What if they look at me and know I work two feet from my bed and think they’re better than me because they have cubicles and a fax machine? What if they can see right through my blazer and slacks and know that the majority of my work is spent in fuzzy socks and a scrunchie from the 1990’s?

This generally escalates into a full blown panic attack and reminds me that I should probably check into getting more human-to-human interaction. I sit in my car outside of whatever Starbucks/office building I’m scheduled to deep breath away the anxiety.

I’m going to go in there and make an ass of myself. I’m carrying too many things. I’m going to say something stupid or worse—something too smart and I’ll be taken advantage of! I’m going to stutter and have misplaced spit collecting in-between my teeth and cheeks while I’m talking. What if I forget everything and don’t contribute anything at all?

Which is never the case, by the way, because anxiety tends to make me even more talkative but less clever. So while I may still be chattering away, my mind is focusing on whether or not my stomachache will last the entire 55 minutes I have left in this meeting. And still I talk. Still they laugh. Still I get my message across and something—usually the mention of a project I’m particularly interested in—always seems to pull me into the moment.

And I forget that my shoes pinch and my high ponytail is so tight its giving me the cheekbones that god never did. I forget what I’m wearing. I forget that being twenty-one and facing down a room full of seasoned professionals is the kind of repetitive nightmare that has become a reality for me in the past few years. And for that brief moment I am in yoga pants and any of my various John Mayer T-Shirts and warm, fuzzy socks.

I guess the trick to overcoming that oh god I don’t want to die in a spitting contest in a constricting pencil skirt kind of feeling is to recognize that:

A)     In a less dramatic fashion, most people feel this way.

B)     Your expertise is not measured by your hair accessory (In most fields.)

C)     And lastly, nobody cares.

Which is actually the golden rule. Because most of the time people aren’t paying attention to your idiosyncrasies as much as you are. They’re trying to delve a little deeper into the lyrics of Your Body Is a Wonderland and figure out how many more minutes left before they can go to lunch.