Okay Rising/If I’m So Brilliant/Choices
The evening I began to take a different path I had the thought, “If I’m so brilliant why am I so miserable?”
At the time I wasn’t even that miserable, not as miserable as I’d been, and not as miserable as I’d come to be, and get through. But I was not enjoying the things in my life that I’d thought would bring me joy: good career, loving partner, family connection, great clothes, apartment, physique, hair. All of it took a lot of energy to keep up, it felt like I was always chasing improvement to avoid plunging into joblessness, homelessness, obesity, and isolation. That was the feeling, constant not-good-enough-ness, constant worry that I would lose everything if I let my guard down, stopped performing, revealed how sad I was, living this lovely life. There was always something — some goal or benchmark just out of reach — that if I got that then I’d be happy.
I told myself I enjoyed the adrenaline. I told myself everyone felt this way, everyone “good” anyway — and to me then good meant ambitious, diligent, hardworking. Accomplished. Productive. But at what? At anything not evil I suppose. Mostly I wasn’t measuring other people I was too busy measuring myself against some more perfect, more productive, version of myself and coming up short — even though on the outside my life looked like I had it all together. I was doing the right stuff according to a certain culture and way of thinking.
And so what happened was, well part of what happened was, I chucked that life and got a new one. And this one looked pretty good from the outside too. Nice house, loving husband, cute kid, community, veggie garden. But that same dang mental pattern of not-good-enough-ness followed me there! I thought that if I changed locations (New York to California) or changed life paths (lawyer to stay-at-home mom) I’d be able to feel less plagued by stress and anxiety just getting through the day.
No. Because that brain pattern came with. I realized I could make running the snack table at a preschool event into a perfectionist’s playground.
And some results proved the value of doing that: Like, accolades, like, external approval, like, when I freelanced, money. Like, brief moments of relief from that inner critic pounding me. “Good job, what’s next?”
Turns out I have the power to get way more reliable relief from that pounding inner voice with mental practice. I don’t need the self-generated misery and flogging to get the goodies, to live a good life being useful and relatively content, taking care of myself, my family, my community, my clients. Turns out if I just do what I do from an internal place of okayness, rather than to get to a place of okayness, things work out even better than when I’m struggling and clawing and chasing and feeling imperiled or like I have something to prove.
I have nothing to prove. I’m here, I’m okay as I am, and I think you are too. I don’t need to generate a next thing for a next thing to emerge. And I get to rest easy knowing that whatever the next thing is I will be able to meet it from a place of easy okayness. It’s a great feeling, the feeling that everything is what it is, unfolding as it will, and so am I, and that’s just fine. It’s a choice. I’m gonna keep going.
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