Once upon a time, we all planned to be rockstars, famous artists, novelists, actors and actresses. People told us we were silly. People told us to work toward the achievable, the responsible, and the practical. But what people never helped us learn is how to be comfortable in our own skin, and able to define ourselves by something other than our careers, our bank accounts, or how we compare to others.
As we grow up, we often realize that our hopes and expectations don’t fit on the plate in front of us. Who we are changes—often without informing our dreams. We develop connections with people, and those connections turn into roots, and we are no longer accountable only to ourselves. When we take risks, we are no longer taking them alone. And sometimes, we crash—hard.
We live in a time where it’s possible to share every aspect of our lives with the rest of the world, whether anyone with whom we share cares or not. When we see what our peers share, instead of interpreting it as their personal reflection of their lives, we allow it to be a reflection on our own. And in doing so, we somehow miss some importance facts.
Just as we choose what stories to tell, what photos to share, and how well we are succeeding, we also choose what stories we tell no one, what images we want to hide, and what failures take us into the dark. It’s not that we intentionally lie or mislead, it’s simply a matter of careful editing.
The combination of unrealized expectations, and seeing the edited versions of people with whom we compare ourselves can be a toxic one.
As children, our parents see us as an extension of themselves, and their beacon into the future. They worry that they will fail us if they don’t encourage or push us to do well. They encourage us to achieve more than they did. They want us to be successful. I don’t think it’s maliciousness, but when we attach those efforts to our dreams, we often find ourselves feeling like we failed if we settle or land somewhere short of those dreams. If something doesn’t feel or seem perfect, it can’t be right. It can’t be good enough.
At many different points, our family—especially our pre-child family—looked like “couples goals.” We traveled here and there, flitted off to this concert or that, and appeared to be the picture in the Pottery Barn frame. People didn’t see the unedited version of our lives, and even when we did try to share that version, it didn’t convince people that we were just like everyone else.
When my rock bottom hit six years ago, all the pictures became ugly, distorted, and I felt everything in my life had been a waste. The failure I felt sent me into a tailspin of disillusionment. In my mind, I had done everything I was supposed to do, but I hadn’t achieved any of my career goals, or dreams, and I had sacrificed half of my life on earth spinning my own wheels. All I had that I valued was my husband and my dog. Without those threads, I honestly don’t know if I would have made it. They were the only reasons I got up every day.
After crashing and burning up, all I knew to do was just try to breathe and put one foot in front of the other. It has taken me years of distance to understand that nothing was a waste, and sometimes bad things and situations just happen. I also learned that no career goal was worth sacrificing my own life for. The craziest part of believing that it was, is that the goal had absolutely nothing to do with my dreams. It was an accidental job that I thought I could turn into something more, since I hadn’t succeeded at becoming a famous foreign correspondent or bestselling author.
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| It’s hard to find the light of what’s real, when the fog of what you think you should be gets in the way. |
How distorted does your vision of self, and your attachment to unrealistic expectations have to be to try and fill the void of being a famous writer with advancement in a veterinary company? Yeah, that was definitely not working out for me. I found myself nowhere that I had ever wanted or planned to be. I was honestly really good at what I did, but it was also true that I was the only one I should be trying to please. For my whole life, I had believed everything I did needed to be more.
Over the last year or so, I have watched expectations and reality crashing with someone I love. I have watched him struggle with being somewhere he didn’t want to be, the disillusionment and self-doubt that resulted from reaching for something that wasn’t really there, and the displaced dust rise from his thud back to the earth. And just like when I found myself at rock bottom, he is lucky not to be going through it alone either.
The distorted reflection of what success is blinds us to ourselves, and all that we actually have accomplished. It steals the simple satisfaction of doing well at something, even if nobody else is watching or cares. That distortion can drive us to chase after phantom goals—phantoms we never really wanted, but thought would put us further down the path to where we really do want to be.
It’s hard. When we meet new people, one of the first things we ask the other person is what they do. In reality, what most of us do in our working lives is a very tiny line on the map of where we have been or where we are going. And yet, we rely on that line to draw a picture of who and what we are. It’s no wonder it’s so easy to feel incomplete. We leave so much of ourselves out of the picture.
The painful truth is that we aren’t all intended to be rockstars. We’re not all placed on this earth with the capacity to cure cancer. Not every one of us is going to Mars. And somehow, we have to embrace that not being those things doesn’t make us less.
Nearly fifty years in, I still want to be a rockstar—or at least some version of rockstar. So, I in no way exempt myself from moments when I ask if what I am now is all I am ever going to be.
Right now, I am trying to learn how to be a badass mom, to a badass girl, with big challenges, and I am trying to nurse the person I love most through the pain of a jump that landed short of his hopes. I have to lay my daughter’s foundation, while helping my husband rebuild his own. I don’t know how I will define myself a year from now, but who I am now, is vital to who these two people in my life will be, and no matter how much my own dreams mean to me, they’re never going to be as important as what I am doing right now.
Sometimes, it’s okay just to be good at what you do, or even just really working at it. It doesn’t mean you pack away your dreams, it just means you color your hair with red streaks to remind yourself that you’re not done—you’re not in a box. It means that you stay up after everyone else is asleep, and try to apply the concept of “use your words” to yourself, so that flickering dream doesn’t burn out along the way.
It’s up to us how we define ourselves, not to someone else’s perfectly edited image, or the worry that we aren’t living up to some imaginary mark on an imaginary measuring stick. Sometimes, we someone to tell us that, and then someone to keep reminding us.
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