I realized that my addictive personality means I should neve try drugs. When I first found “success” or rather, accomplishments that adults would praise me for, I realized that I was always going to be searching for that. I would be looking for an Ivy League class to raise my hand first in. I would be yearning for a giant mega corporation to take me under their wing and applaud my PowerPoint on economic increase. I would be looking for conventional ways to tell the rest of the world that I was going so fast that, not only could no one keep up, but I would never slow down.
Now, I’m terrified to know what it is to fail. Not just fail, but I mean, completely mess it all up and never be able to fix it and need to learn from it and leave it alone. I am scared of failing, yet I keep trying everything I possibly can.
However, since we are living in unprecedented times, I have unprecedented expectations of what success is when I can’t leave my house. I’ve found myself hyper fixating on the unrealistic- like moving across the country with no money and a tendency to get sick from the stress of just existing. I keep holding onto a hope that I will be able to just pack up and leave to another country. A new language, a new name, and new person. And I know that isn’t the success I want. I don’t want to successfully fade from my life here, but I know that it is beginning to be a bigger notion and a bigger want. I want to be free. My success would be going out and being able to see people and meet them and perform. It seems that I will forever think of success as something unattainable.
Maybe I do that so it feels like I will forever have something to work for. Maybe I do that so that I can always get my hopes up and settle. Maybe I’m afraid to figure out what I really want because that means giving up the idea that I can do everything.
I want to think that I can do everything- and that success will be that freedom. The freedom to indulge in all my interests at once, and not sacrifice. Perhaps somewhere along the way, I mistook success for greed, and greediness for the ability to balance it all. Maybe I thought that if I did everything, there wasn’t a way that I could be denied.
If I sing, dance, and act, is there any way that I can be denied the lead role? If I’m a vocalist and a bassist, why wouldn't they put me in the band? If I was the best, why wouldn’t I be treated as such?
Success became the idea of being the absolute best, even if that meant sacrificing my health and happiness. Who cared if I hadn’t slept more than 5 hours a night if I was the president of 4 clubs? Who cared if I was eating 1000 calories a day if I was the lead in the play and running tech for the black box show? Who cared if I was dying if it looked like I was living life to the fullest?
It seems that all my ideas of success are built upon two things:
Competition (usually, with others, not myself)
Validation (outside, not intrinsic)
And I can tell you, that has not treated 18 year old me very well. I saw many people as competition, or if I heard about someone doing something I wanted to do (like making music, starring in a show, etc.) it automatically made me feel as if I wasn’t good enough and there wouldn’t be a place for me. Like blinders on a horse, I needed to be focused straight ahead. If I saw someone else succeeding, that was the same to me as failing. That, dear reader, is incredibly toxic, and I know that now. I’ve realized that I’ve distanced myself from amazing people because I was worried they would be better than me, and if they were better, they wouldn’t want to be hanging around a self proclaimed loser.
Singing always felt natural to me, and so did self destruction, apparently. I don’t know where this idea began. Maybe it was built upon all the times my grandparents told me I was something special, and maybe it was all the times I heard those small remarks meant to tear other women down.
“Oh, she’d be great if she would dress more modestly.”
“She’s generally a great musician, but wow, that last piece, she’s lost her touch.”
I remember these small remarks made to women- things that devalued their worth when they didn’t reach perfection. And I think somewhere in my brain as a child, I connected their shortcomings (perceived shortcomings) as a way to validated that I was still doing well, because no one was saying those things to me. Women are raised from childhood to view other women as competition. Don’t trust her, she’ll take your man, sort of thing. With the rise of social media, this trend has only continued. Leading to an increase of women who are “not like other girls”, it made me take a step back and realize that most of the criticism I had of myself and of the work of other women came from the fact that men and those who were important in our lives painted other women as something to be different from.
Women, stereotypical women, in my upbringing (the ones you were supposed to be different from) were caricatures of makeup and pink. Shopping and daftness. I didn’t want to be reduced to that when I was older, and it’s wildly unfair that young women are raised under the assumption that all women other than themselves are this sort of caricature. It’s internalized misogyny at its finest.
As I got older and became, I don’t know, not awful, I realized that, by splitting women into a dichotomy of ones who were one dimensional, and ones who were “different” enough to be separated, not only was that dehumanizing, it was also helping men to do the same. If women did this, it meant that men would also look at women and decide which ones were worth something, and which ones let them make sexist jokes. I realized that I needed to separate my idea of succeeding from the idea of competing, because without that, I would fall victim to my own oppression and dehumanization at the hands of men.
I think that idea is what turned success into synonyms with competition. I had to do everything so that I wasn’t like the misogynistic idea of what women were.
Next, validation was like methamphetamines. Terrible to start, and even worse to get off of. Hearing from people that I was pretty, smart, insert adjective here was enough to make me think I could only be those things if someone told me I was. Clearly that isn’t true. There are millions of things that exist without being explicitly seen and stated. Sounds still happen without people to hear them, art is still made without a place in a gallery, and people still love each other without a meaning to it. Things don’t need to be labeled to be allowed to exist. However, in my teenage and even preteen brain, that statement applied to everyone but me. I had to be seen, heard, and liked to have the things I did have meaning.
I have no clue where this came from, but it has definitely made things way harder. I want to paint, but what if everyone hates it? Worse, what if no one ever sees it? It seems that I expect fame from myself as a way to make sure that someone, somewhere, will in fact like something I do, and will tell me that. I have been working to do things just for myself, and just so I can improve my artistry.
It is hard though, knowing I’ve made something great, and just not having the group of people who will see it. It’s hard wanting to make things, but knowing that the work I do may only amount to my improvement. It shouldn’t be that way, but being validated was the only indicator in my youth that I was on the right path.
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