{"id":3781,"date":"2019-08-07T09:12:55","date_gmt":"2019-08-07T14:12:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/?p=3781"},"modified":"2019-08-06T10:55:11","modified_gmt":"2019-08-06T15:55:11","slug":"thoughts-at-mid-career-part-2-ambition-you-are-not-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/2019\/08\/07\/thoughts-at-mid-career-part-2-ambition-you-are-not-enough\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts at Mid-Career Part 2 – Ambition: You are Not Enough"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the second in a series of essays. You can access the first here<\/a>, though it’s not necessary to read them all or in order:<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cSo maybe my great ambition, such as it is, is to refrain from engagement with systems that purport to tell me what I\u2019m worth compared to anyone else. Maybe my great ambition is to steer clear of systems. Any systems. All systems. (Please Like and Share this essay if you agree!) What I would like to say is: Lean In my hairy Jewish ass.\u201d
\n-Elisa Albert \u201cThe Snarling Girl<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

When I was a kid, I was what they then called, pigeon-toed. My mother seemed to see this as a character defect and one that was within my power to fix. She would walk behind me (from my early years well into my teens) saying \u201cpractice! You\u2019re toeing in!\u201d to get me to practice walking with my feet straight ahead. That was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what I was doing wrong. My acne came from my not washing my face well enough, not hormones. In high school, I started using rubbing alcohol on my face because I was convinced I was filthy. The gap between my teeth was something bad that needed to be fixed. When I was bullied at the bus stop in fourth grade, I was a \u201cninny\u201d who wasn\u2019t brave enough to stand up for herself. No one was going to marry me if I continued to hold my fork wrong, wore those ugly shoes, etc., etc., etc. I was one big walking deficit.<\/p>\n

I know my mother meant well and wanted me to have what she believed I needed to be successful in life, but what those constant criticisms did was make me deeply self-conscious (sometimes to the point of paranoid persistent thoughts) and feel like I would never be enough. When a friend in college who also had a gap between her front teeth told me her mother told her it was a sign of wisdom, I burst into tears on the spot. What would I have been like had someone told me the things that made me different made me special?<\/p>\n

But we all get these messages, right? If you don\u2019t get the message that you\u2019re not enough from your family or your peers, you certainly get it from traditional media and social media. I know there are positive accounts on Instagram, but it mostly seems like a highly-effective anxiety, low self-esteem, and FOMO engine. And probably those perfect people with their perfect lives are not actually as perfect as they portray, but it\u2019s so easy to let the message seep into you that you are not enough in all the ways that matter. You\u2019re not pretty enough, successful enough, popular enough, or doing enough cool things. I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about my own mental models around what a good life looks like. And I realize that so many of my assumptions and ambitions were predicated on the idea that I am not enough just as I am.<\/p>\n

I will fully admit to having felt the way Heather Havrilesky does in her book What if This Were Enough<\/a><\/em>, and I\u2019m grateful to have mostly made my way out of that space:<\/p>\n

I wonder if I have the face of a woman who missed out on something. This is the shape my mid-life crisis is taking: I\u2019m worried about what I have time to accomplish before I get too old to do anything. I\u2019m fixated on what my life should look like by now. I\u2019m angry at myself because I should look better, I should be in better shape, I should be writing more, I should be a better cook and a more present, enthusiastic mother. Sometimes I go online looking for inspiration, but all I find is evidence that everyone in the world is more energetic than me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don\u2019t want to define myself by what I don\u2019t have and what I\u2019m not doing. I don\u2019t feel like I\u2019ve missed out or that I\u2019ve taken the wrong path. I\u2019m learning to accept the person I am rather than feel envious and inadequate or force myself to do things that are harmful to me. For so many years, I forced myself into professional situations that caused me extreme stress. I live with social anxiety and it\u2019s taken me a long time to accept that it\u2019s not something I\u2019m going to \u201cget over\u201d by pushing myself to do things that make me miserable. I used to feel such a terrible sense of FOMO when I\u2019d skip a social or work event because of my anxiety. When I significantly cut down on speaking at conferences, I felt like I was disappearing \u00e0 la Michael J. Fox at the end of Back to the Future. But I think we have a choice: we can focus on what we do not have or we can focus on what we do. I\u2019ll take the latter. There is so much I have to be grateful for.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m also taking inspiration from people who are paragons of self-love. I recently listened to an interview with one of my favorite baseball players right now<\/a>, Pete Alonso<\/a>. He talked about how he was told in his sophomore year of high school by his coach that he was never ever going to be a professional baseball player. In his Freshman year of college, he got a C on a paper about his career ambitions because it wasn\u2019t realistic. In the minor leagues, scouts said he was a great hitter, but would never be able to field the ball at a professional level. He ignored all of those naysayers, worked his ass off, and is now kicking ass on the New York Mets at first base and just won the homerun derby and played well in the MLB All Star Game (and wore THIS\u00a0on the red carpet<\/a>, which makes me love him all the more). Lizzo is also a powerful role model for loving yourself just as you are. At the Lizzo concert I went to, she said \u201cif I shouldn\u2019t be full of myself, who should I be full of?\u201d Right! People treat self-love like it\u2019s something negative and shameful. But in a world purpose-built to bring us down and make us feel less-than, I can\u2019t help but think that confidence and self-love are acts of resistance.<\/p>\n