I have a lot of mementos of past achievements hanging around my apartment. I keep the ones around that hold mostly good memories that helped to guide the path I’ve taken and to shape the person I’ve become. I’ve had to get rid of others that hold bad memories or simply prompt the question, “What was I thinking?”
I know exactly what I was thinking. That I did it because it would be a nice thing to do. Or because it was something to achieve that would look good on a resume. I did it because I could.
I’ve talked a lot with therapists about how could and should are not the same word.
We’ve also discussed my issues as a former gifted kid. Turns out, it wasn’t just perfectionism and undiagnosed anxiety and depression. It was also an almost constant state of burnout. I just thought that was normal. If I wasn’t exhausted, I must not be working hard enough. Who knew that wasn’t healthy? Oh, everyone knew that? OK, then.
[PSA – I’m fairly confident you’re working hard enough. Why don’t you take a break? Maybe have some water? When was the last time you ate something?]
One of the hardest parts of this unraveling is figuring out what constitutes a reasonable expectation. It’s been over twenty years since I earned that last tassel, and taking the highest possible level of achievement and internalizing it as an expectation is still one of my biggest struggles.
I have made a lot of progress. It’s gotten pretty easy to see when other people’s expectations of me are unreasonable, and I often have a visceral reaction to them, especially when they don’t align with my values. The example that springs to mind is when someone said to me, “Oh, so you’re not really using your degree at all?” when I talked about my job. First, my degrees are in communication, so the fact that I had the superior diplomacy skills necessary to refrain from imitating a velociraptor when she said that was itself an example of using my degree. Second, the idea that something is only worthwhile if it can be used to earn money disgusts me. Especially something as rich and formative as the whole of my college experience was. The very idea that I am somehow obligated to capitalize on all my knowledge, talents, skills, and connections doesn’t live up to my standards at all.
[Another PSA – If your college experience was not rich or formative, you didn’t necessarily do it wrong. As someone who has spent her whole career in higher education, I’m fairly confident it was them, not you.]
Most of my struggles lie in overcoming my own unreasonable expectations of myself. I still say yes way too often simply because I can. Because I know I’ll be good at it. Because I know it will be helpful. Because I know it would probably take me less time to do it than it will take someone else with less experience. And if it ends up taking me longer than I think it should, I am brutal with myself. Once, I was berating myself for turning in something later than I wanted to (still before the deadline, mind you – just not as early as I had planned) and my boss said, “You know you are still the first to turn it in, right? No one else has finished yet.” And without missing a beat, I responded, “Yes, but I’m extraordinary.” To his credit, he did not laugh in my face. He just let it sit there and marinate. And I took a much-needed walk.
As I’ve been trying to cut out the things that I’m involved in that don’t really bring me joy or stress me out, I’ve been bumping up against all the expectations I’ve taken on. I suspect that’s why the process is harder than I hoped it would be. But if I want the lush life I envision, I must work to move on from these responsibilities and the expectations that hold me to them.
M. Suzanne Terry 