Gremlin Trouble

If you’re like me, you’ve believed in lucky gremlins at one time or another since arriving at Harvard. These fickle demons tantalize and demoralize, ensuring that when things are going well for you, everything goes well. But, if you get on their bad side—watch out! Because, sure enough your misfortunes will quickly begin to pile up.

Why is it that luck seems to run in such streaks? There are times when things couldn’t be better. You’re on top of the world, success follows success, nothing stands between you and your dreams. Other weeks, you will be going on your merry way, when all of a sudden, you seem to have angered the gods. Misfortune piles upon misfortune, until you are in such a funk that you just want to throw up your hands at the supernatural forces opposing you.

I’m not one to anger any such beings by claiming they don’t exist—but I will say that one of the gremlins has a more familiar name, self-esteem.

The last thing I want to suggest is that having high self-esteem will ensure good luck; there are plenty of self-help books devoted to that nonsense. I do, however, believe that many of us suffer from all too fragile egos and a tendency at self-flagellation.

The nature of the syndrome is that as you go through college, you occasionally come across a stumbling block on the way to your goals—a bad grade, an internship rejection, a nasty break-up—fill your favorite disappointment in the blank. These disappointments unleash the self-esteem gremlin, who mockingly says, “Ha! I told you that you would fail. Doesn’t [disappointment from above] show that you really don’t have what it takes? Face it-you’re just not good enough.”

Even as you successfully tuck the gremlin away for now, reassuring yourself that the blip is a one-time misstep, inconsequential in the scheme of things, lingering doubts remain, a crack in your self-confidence. But then you suffer the more common minor annoyances of everyday life—you make a comment that is quickly dismissed in section as irrelevant, a close friend doesn’t say ‘hi’ on the street, or you feel passed over in an extracurricular—and the self-esteem gremlin once again rears its ugly head. Except this time, it’s harder to resist the smug dismissals and mocking glares. And before you know it, you’ve subconsciously begun to believe the little bastard.

Let’s be honest with ourselves—there’s no shortage of arrogance among Harvard students. When you tell a room of science concentrators that statistically, two of them will win Nobel Prizes, each wonders who the other winner will be. This over-confidence allows us to accomplish great things, but it also causes us to cast furtive glances at our peers, sizing up and being sized up. But the downside to this arrogance and competitiveness is that many of us here at Harvard have fragile egos. The minute our gremlins pop our halos, we’re in trouble. All of a sudden, our luck is off. Things just don’t seem to be going right. We have “the worst week ever.”

Sometimes it’s just easier to blame our failures on the system than to face the truth that we may have weaknesses. Sometimes we’d rather believe in gremlins than take a hit to our egos. Because once you start looking for things to undermine your self-confidence, you’ll find no shortage of them. There will always be something you could have done better, and there will always be people who are doing better. You can find things wrong in anything you do. It’s just too easy to hit that downward spiral, especially here, where when you look around you, everyone else seems to be staying afloat.

So I say: believe in lucky gremlins. Because the truth is, no one here is completely secure, and we have a tendency to be too hard on ourselves—alright, some of us have a tendency to be too hard on ourselves. We may be constructing illusions, but our endless self-examination is no more real. Placing the blame on something else is far healthier than endlessly beating ourselves up.

Robert J. Fenster ’03 is a biology concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.