I don't get nervous about job interviews. When I figured out that Mom's advice about just being yourself was really and truly the best way to approach, well, everything, I really leaned into it. I flounce into interviews with good posture, a style that says I give a shit but I don't try too hard, I prepare myself with a few odds and ends of information about the agency I'm interviewing at and the people there I'm talking to. Pretty standard stuff.

And my interviews always go great. Well, at least I think they always go great. There is the outstanding fact that I am technically unemployed. But I've only been in New York for a week, so maybe it's not that big of a deal, right? Right.

Or maybe I suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

From Wikipedia: The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is.

In other words you think you're a paragon of intelligence and effectiveness, but actually you're a feckless mess who can barely cross a street without getting hit by a bus. You think you're hot shit, but you are actually a flaming bag of poo on the front porch of the world.

I had an interview yesterday—my first real job interview in NYC—with an agency I have always wanted to work with called Mekanism. (They do fantastically weird and hilarious stuff like the Messing with Sasquatch commercials for Jack Links.) So, while I never get nervous about job interviews, I was a little nervous about this one, but was trying to just be chill and not behave like Beyoncé had just invited me out for happy hour and pedicures. But that's kind of how I felt.

Still, everyone's mother's advice cycled in my head like a mantra: just be yourself, just be yourself, just be yourself.

And an hour later I walked out of their lovely office building in the Financial District and wandered around just taking in the goddamn New Yorkness of New York and I thought to myself, "Self, that went great!"

But then, I thought about the really straightforward questions the owner of the agency asked me: What's your favorite ad you've seen lately? What have you been reading? Which of our clients are you most interested to work on?

Normally, answers to these questions come readily. I am prepared. And I thought I was yesterday, too. But then I realized I was stammering nonsense while my mind riffled through every useless thought, nothing related at all to advertising or clients or basically anything smart or witty or that displayed my competence and experience or the knowledge behind my opinions.

I mean, I have spent the last two months upending my life in some highly crucial ways that are not to be taken fucking lightly. I left my home of eleven years in the smoldering ruins of a bad breakup and moved across the country, where I now live sans the necessary trappings of adulthood such as an apartment and a job. So I'm a little scrambled. It's to be expected that my functions are not at their sharpest.

Or, I'm not the intelligent, confident professional I think I am. I am actually a bumbling bag of flesh who shows up and displays haughtily her subpar intelligence and lack of step-to ability, all while thinking she's got something to offer.

Perhaps I am the flaming bag of poo on the doorstep. And that's why I don't have a job.

The thing that makes the Dunning-Kruger effect especially tricky is that those who suffer from it, don't know they suffer from it. Literally the main symptom of Dunning-Kruger is not knowing you have Dunning-Kruger. Perhaps my nonchalance about job interviews I was attributing to confidence and ease of being, when actually it was just me buying into my own delusions of my awesomeness.

My only hope is this: if I'm actually worried I have it, then that means I don't, right?

God, I hope so.

Mekanism! CALL ME.