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ricksbowen · 5 years

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simply, utterly | pt. 2

IN WHICH: the rivalry between y/n and ricky is still going on strong despite the musical, but they make a decision for the musical’s sake.

INSPIRATION: alright — supergrass, hello? — clairo

A/N: thank you for all the love you gave me on the last part. i hope y’all enjoy this part too :)

pt. 1, pt. 2, pt. 3, pt. 4, pt. 5, pt. 6, pt. 7

“Miss Jenn, there has to be a mistake—“

“I’m telling you both, there is no mistake!” Gracefully moving around the backstage, Miss Jenn didn’t even turn to the two of you as you and Ricky struggled to keep up with her.

“But I can’t work with,” your eyes snapped to Ricky for just a second. “Him,” you hissed, as if the mere mention of him was poison on your tongue.

Ricky faked a smile towards you, dropping it almost instantaneously as he rolled his eyes. “What Caswell is trying to ask,” he glared at you, “is: don’t you think that we lack, uh, the compatibility to play Troy and Gabriella?”

You opened your mouth to add on, before receiving another cold glare from Ricky that made you shut your mouth unwillingly.

“Oh, Ricky,” Miss Jenn gushed, stopping in her tracks to look at the two of you. You wouldn’t have been surprised if she started pinching Ricky’s cheeks like an aunt on Thanksgiving. “Can’t you see it? The tension between the both of you. You two are perfect together!” Miss Jenn clapped her hands out of excitement before bounding away, off to take care of more pressing matters.

Ricky sighed, running a hand through his hair stressfully before glancing at you. Your eyebrows were furrowed, eyes spacing out into blank space as your fists stayed clenched. You were mad — pissed off, even — at the choice of casting, and Ricky knew that. He smirked at you, nudging you with his shoulder and snapping you out of your trance.

“Panties in a twist?” he snarked, silently cursing himself for his sarcastic tone.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” you grumbled, turning to him and putting your hand on his chest to shove him out of your way.

—

“Wait— You have to play lovey-dovey with Ricky Bowen?”

“Yes!” You groaned, falling backwards onto your bed. You stared up at the glowing stars on your ceiling, listening to EJ pace around your room in thought.

“How’re you gonna pull this off?” EJ asked, his face popping up over you as he looked over you with concern. He was ticked off that Ricky took his spot as Troy, sure, but the fact that his little sister had to pretend she loved her enemy bothered him even more. He had always been protective over you. Ever since you were welcomed into the Caswell home when you were five, EJ promised to care for you.

“I don’t know!” You were obviously stressed— you had been picking at your clothes since you read the cast list.

“Well you gotta come up with something quick,” EJ advised, crossing his arms over his chest. “Honestly, if you’re uncomfortable with doing it just step down—“

“What?” you sat up, turning to your brother with an incredulous look. “No! That’s— That’s like accepting defeat!”

“This isn’t a war, Y/N.”

“It is if it’s against Dick Bowen!”

“Whatever,” Ej rolled his eyes, waving off your dramatics as teenage hormones. He’d be blind if he said that he didn’t notice the obvious tension between you and Ricky. “I’ll just leave you here to do your angsty shit. Or just put a facemask on; something to calm you down.” His words were muttered under his breath as he left your room, shutting your door behind him.

There were a few things Ricky hated about his house. Sometimes the toilet clogged during unconventional moments. The stairs were too creaky for him to even attempt to sneak out. Everytime wind blew by, his house felt like the inflatable air dancers that stores always kept out.

But the one thing he hated the most? He had a window in his bedroom that gave him a perfect view of your bedroom from across the street. It had been that way for years, much to his dismay. You both pretended to act as if your houses never existed, but Ricky still remembered how you’d both make time to flip each other off from your rooms in the sixth grade, or how you both used to draw huge, obscene pictures that your parents would’ve never allowed.

Sometimes he looked through his window. Sometimes he saw you on the other side— this was one of those times.

There you were, dancing in a huge shirt as you held your hairbrush to your mouth like a microphone, yelling the lyrics to the song. Your speakers blasted your music ( Ricky could hear it from his house ) and— was that Hannah Montana? Best of Both Worlds? Oh, he was gonna tease you about that for sure.

Ricky snorted to himself, unable to keep his eyes off of your carefree dancing. He felt his heart stop when you stopped, turning to look at him through your window. Your face was green due to the facemask you put on, and you squinted at him in disgust from across the road that separated your houses.

“Creeper,” you mouthed, Ricky only grinning cheekily at you from his room.

“You look stupid,” Ricky mouthed back, smiling triumphantly at your angry expression.

You dropped the hairbrush and raised one of your hands, flicking your middle finger up before shutting your blinds.

You had spent a lot of time that night thinking about your situation. You had come up with an idea — a poor one, but it was an idea nonetheless.

You had approached him the next day, trying to keep a cool head as you walked up to his locker. You wanted to do well in the musical— you weren’t going to let your rivalry with Ricky get in the way.

“Ricky— Ricky, she’s coming,” Big Red said, voice becoming higher pitched as he saw you from afar. “Ricky, why is she coming towards us?” In all honesty, Big Red was intimidated by you. You were a Caswell, known in school for being outspoken and for being the opposite of your brother, and you were cast as Gabriella Montez? Your whole energy intimidated him, and he found himself standing awkwardly as you finally walked up to them both.

Ricky sent a reassuring smile to Big Red, one that lasted only a second before you stopped alongside him. “If you’re here to ask me on a date—” Ricky began, voice smug and teasing as he continued to rummage through his locker.

“You wish,” you interrupted, rolling your eyes before crossing your arms over your chest. “Look. If you want to pull this musical off we have to get along somehow.”

“Never expected you to make the mature decision,” Ricky hummed, the stupid, stupid smirk that he always reserved just for you plastered on his face.

“All I’m saying is,” you said, furrowing your brows and looking at the floor. “We need to be civil. After all this bullshit is over, we can go back.” You offered your hand out to him. “Deal?”

Ricky sent a look to Big Red, who responded with a hand-shaking motion, nodding over to where you stood. With a somewhat reluctant sigh, Ricky took your hand in his, shaking your hand firmly. “We go back,” he muttered, quiet enough so that only you could hear. “After it’s all over.”

“That’s the plan,” you grumbled, the handshake lasting for a second too long before you took your hand back. With one more tight-lipped smile to Big Red and Ricky, you turned around and walked away, disappearing into the crowd of students.

“Holy shit, Miss Jenn wasn’t kidding about the tension between you two,” Big Red commented, grinning cheekily as Ricky shoved his shoulder in response.

“Shut up, man.”

“Honestly, just make out with her already!”

—

TAGS: @softpeteparker , @jointherebellion215 , @l-tt-e , @broken-from-fandoms , @uwupxterparker

#ricky bowen x reader #ricky bowen headcannons #ricky bowen angst #ricky bowen smut #ricky bowen hcs #ricky bowen imagines #ricky bowen #joshua bassett hcs #joshua bassett angst #joshua bassett imagines #joshua bassett x reader #joshua bassett #ej caswell #big red #hsmtmts #high school musical: the musical: the series

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the-bounce-back · 5 years

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THE CONFIDENCE CHRONICLES PART I - CONFIDENCE IN THE WORKPLACE

First of all… yes, I know I said I’d spend more time writing and have this out a week after my previous post. But to be honest… I say a lot of things, and a lot of those things are pure rubbish. I’m here now, stop crying.

I’m joking, before anyone gets triggered. Life really just kept getting in the way - word to my girl Gabriella Montez. There’s been a lot going on that has had me in my feelings, and as mentioned in earlier posts I don’t particularly like writing when I’m feeling like I want to get hit by a bus. But hey, on the bright side it’s given me loads of topic ideas to write about at a later stage, so, you know… silver linings and that.

Anyways. As mentioned briefly in my previous post, I have decided to do a series of posts entirely dedicated to building your self-confidence in different aspects in life. The series will consist of five slightly shorter “bite-sized” posts, that will outline various methods, mindsets, exercises and thought processes to apply to everyday life - all of which have been crucial to myself in my own confidence jOuRnEy.

I’ve decided to do this series for a whole load of reasons, the main ones being the following:

1. For the first time in my adult life I can genuinely say that I am getting to be comfortable with who I am, what I’m doing and where I’m going (for the most part) - a feeling that I genuinely want others to experience as well.

2. Unlearning years of self-hate, constant self-criticism and your brain telling you that you’re not worthy enough/smart enough/good enough to achieve what you want to achieve is a disgustingly long and heartbreaking task. I really wish I had something to guide me along the way, but I think I’ll find comfort in knowing that someone might read this and not feel as alone during their own process.

3. Although we all have insecurities about different things, that sh*t can really isolate us and make us feel abnormal and alone. I’m hoping that writing about how I overcame/am in the process of overcoming my insecurities will aid in destigmatising these kind of feelings as a whole.

With that being said, my first post in this series will be about confidence in the workplace. Starting with the easy stuff, so to speak.

I realised recently that it’s been quite a while since I’ve given any kind of indication of how work is going, which is actually one of the main reasons why I relocated to London in the first place. My previous posts discuss a lot of the anxiety leading up to it, and my post about giving yourself accolades (again, read it here because it’s some of my best work) discusses how I forced myself to cast my humility aside in my job interview to appear more confident. This post will kind of be an elaboration on this, as I have settled in to my role and have developed this confidence further.

I’ve been at this job for a little over four months now, and a lot has changed since I was sat there in that interview making myself come across as I had Kanye levels of self-confidence and like I wasn’t absolutely bricking it. Despite it probably being the maddest test of my resilience to stress and pressure since exam season in 3rd year, I really am enjoying it in the sense that I am being challenged on a daily basis, I have a lot of freedom in terms of how I organise my work, and I have excellent means to stay motivated to keep working towards a promotion. As far as what I was rambling on about in my interview goes - this is exactly what I wanted from my new role.

However - as I should have anticipated, expectations almost definitely always significantly stray from reality. I think that the largest reason for my confidence wavering a few weeks into the position was definitely due to the shock of how different it was from the expectations I had conjured up in my head, and there was a period of a few weeks where I seriously started to question if I was cut out for this type of work. Consider your girl humbled.

I think the biggest shock was how fast-paced, loud and energised the working environment was - this is obviously a good thing, but considering the way both my mental state and general energy levels have been these past few months I think it’s all just been quite overwhelming, and probably ended up making me feel like I didn’t have the drive and motivation required to be successful within the organisation.

In other words… I was having a bit of a weak-b*tch-with-an-inferiority-complex moment. How embarrassing and sauceless.

Anyways, that’s all over now - I’ve been able to reevaluate my approach to the role and how to tAkE cOnTrOl of my situation by establishing a few things to be mindful of while I’m at work - small things that have really made a big difference for me, and might be able to help you feel more secure and confident in your role, too.

1, Remember that everyone there has been in your position.

So you all know by now that I’m a sucker for clichés - because they’re always true. On my first day at my new job I felt so intimidated by the size of the office, the amount of employees, the fact that my senior sales manager literally sits two desks away from me… literally everything felt so overwhelming. Not necessarily in a bad way, but my mind was definitely in overdrive from the vast amount of information. That, along with my insecurities of being the New Person™ and not knowing anything about the lingual services industry - and having to have a 1on1 meeting with the regional director within 3 hours of being in the office.

What got me through that first week of awkwardness and feeling like a complete idiot was constantly reiterating to myself that I’m definitely not the first and definitely not the last to be in this position, that I will learn tHe RoPeS over time and that we all have to start somewhere. I know this doesn’t sound like a ground-breaking epiphany, but as someone that is used to understanding/catching on to to things very quickly, not knowing what the f*ck was going on definitely swayed my confidence at the time. I used to proper hate being the only person not knowing how things work, and constantly having to ask for help - but I’ve managed to flip it around and make it a confidence booster, instead. This, in the sense that I’ve acknowledged my drive and determination to not be the clueless new person, and to excel within my field by asking loads of questions and forcing myself out of my comfort zone. Doing this successfully has definitely made me more secure and appreciative of my learning abilities, and this confidence definitely hasn’t gone unnoticed by upper management.

This even relates back to points made in previous posts - learning to be kind and patient with yourself and learning to not freak out when you’re not in control of a situation. Additionally, I confidently leaned on one of my main selling points that I discovered when evaluating my suitability for this kind of job - my ability to learn new things fast, and my ability to adapt to a new situation.

Look at me, taking my own advice for once. You know what that is? Growth. I have to stan.

2. Eliminate tentativeness when you communicate with others - regardless of seniority.

This is definitely a psychological aspect of confidence more than anything. Regardless of if you work in a soulless corporation or one of those mOdErN organisations that swears that they don’t have a hierarchical structure, chances are you have a person or multiple people that you report to.

I began to notice that the combination of not being knowledgeable of this industry and now having to report directly to senior managers that have been in the industry for over a decade made me feel very insecure about having to ask for help or even asking questions in general, because I felt that I was wasting their valuable time with things that I felt that I should have known already. As in, really industry-specific things that would’ve been really weird if I had known them at the time.

To combat this feeling, I forced myself to remember that these senior managers - after stripping away their years of experience, industry knowledge and fancy titles - are human as well, and definitely were in my position at some point. Remembering that even the CEO was once a bumbling and confused idiot like myself at one point definitely aided me in seeing the bigger picture - that without investing in recruitment, training and mentoring of new people, the future of the company is literally f*cked. The recognition of this fact definitely almost eliminated my inferiority complex, and I was able to see senior managers as equals with a lot of valuable advice and knowledge, instead of these terrifying looming dementors that were waiting for me to mess up and fire me.

So, how does this relate to eliminating tentativeness when communicating with others?

I’m glad you asked. In corporate settings, internal communication and project coordination is predominantly done over emails, and where I work almost all communications have senior managers in cc in order to provide visibility into what is happening - good or bad. Obviously I could go on for ages about how to feel more confident in having so many high-up people within the company watching your every move, but really and truly there’s only one thing that I’ve been doing that I feel is worth mentioning:

I removed the word “just” from my vocabulary.

That is, in the context of when I’m asking a question or asking for help, e.g.:

“I’m just wondering if…”

“I’m just double checking that…”

“I just wanted to ask…”

If you read those beginnings of sentences out loud, you’ll probably hear that using the word “just” inserts a sense of tentativeness, submissiveness and insecurity in one's own knowledge. Furthermore, it makes you come across as apologetic for doing your job properly or asking questions - which is obviously ridiculous.

I’m know that removing the word “just” from my vocabulary probably has little to no effect on how upper management sees me, but that’s not really the point here. The point is that when I make a conscious effort to not utilise the word, I’m very self-aware in the sense that I’m choosing to come across as more assertive and confident - which has lead me to feel more comfortable when I’m communicating with those higher up in the organisation than me.

It’s a very small change, but it has definitely affected my confidence and assertiveness in my role. The power of a simple word, eh? The mind boggles.

3. Evaluate exactly what you want to get out of this job, and do something every day that will get you closer to this goal.

This is definitely the most important point for me. For the first time in my life, I’m in a job that I genuinely see myself staying at and progressing within - and there’s plenty of opportunities, concrete targets and support to keep me motivated enough to keep grinding towards a promotion. I genuinely want to excel within the company (at least for the time being - who knows how I’ll feel a few months down the line?), and the feeling of being sure of that has made me a lot more confident alone.

Of course, not everyone is at a stage in their career where they feel like a promotion within the company they work for is the ultimate goal. The fact of the matter is that some jobs are solely means to an end for other unrelated goals, like saving up for something or to get work experience for the job you actually want. Either way, I strongly believe that knowing the purpose for even going to work every day in the first place gives you this deep-rooted determination, motivation and resilience to workplace bullsh*t that ends up manifesting itself as confidence.

Put it this way - if you know exactly what you are working towards in this specific role, there really shouldn’t be anything that can sway you from achieving this (assuming that you want it enough). Going into work on at least a majority of days (because let’s face it, sometimes you just want to have a chill at work) with a mission of doing something that will get you closer to your goal will not only help you stay focused on completing the tasks, but will also give you the ability to not let minor conflicts and “hiccups” along the way get to you. Trust me, you won’t even have the energy to worry about what other people are doing - and personally speaking, being this set in your own lane does wonders for feeling insecure.

Of course, it is slightly difference for those who aren’t entirely sure what their next move is, and that are doing a job for the sole purpose of paying bills and staying fed. I feel that a lot of people - myself in the past included - let the lack of direction really get to them and end up in a very destructive rut of just existing without finding their purpose, and letting it break down their self-esteem along the way. However, I honestly feel that being in this kind of position can - and should - be seen as an opportunity for growth and fInDiNg YoUrSelF outside of work. Yes, figuring out what you want to do is incredibly daunting, but I think that we often make the mistake in assuming that the path we choose is the path we have to stay on for the rest of our lives. No pressure.

With that being said, working a job you don’t care about can still be empowering and confidence-boosting in the sense that you know for a fact that once you know what you want to do, you can easily just walk away from it without feeling that you’ve made a mistake. There is something very powerful in knowing that you can just drop everything and leave at any second as soon as you’ve had enough of it, and I’ve even promised myself to apply this to my current job if I ever change my mind about it. Life’s too short to do sh*t you don’t want to do.

Anyways, there you have it - three mindsets that I’ve applied to my career plans that have made me feel a lot more confident when making decisions in the workplace. Hopefully you’ve been able to take something away from it, and that you know that you’re capable of achieving anything you wish to pursue career-wise if you’re willing to put in hard work, and committed to being happy with the direction your life is going.

Love,

Liv

#selflove #selfhelp #Empowerment

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