Photo by MChe Lee on UnsplashI have lived, by all accounts, a very privileged and generally good life. I grew up in a loving, stable family with parents who clearly loved each other and loved me; I was never in any real danger of going without food or shelter or proper medical care; I got a good education; and I was allowed to pursue my own interests. These are all things that I am incredibly grateful for.
However, starting in high school I developed a fairly debilitating anxiety disorder, and I’ve spent the last 14 or so years dealing with the struggles and consequences of that. I became frequently paralyzed by the prospect of failure, and believed that whatever outcome resulted from my failure would be catastrophic and basically life-threatening. So my grades suffered, not because I couldn’t do the work but because my work was always late or hastily completed last-minute. I struggled to feel safe in social situations, so I spent a lot of time isolating myself or making myself as unobtrusive and small as possible. My self-esteem plummeted, and I often questioned whether my friends actually liked me. Making basic decisions filled me with dread. It got to the point where I felt safer staying in bed and sleeping rather than going to class and face the possibility of walking in late. I developed depression. I slept a lot, and ate to soothe my anxieties, gaining a lot of weight — about a hundred pounds since graduating high school. (I have since lost about sixty of that, thankfully.)
For much of this time I struggled to pursue the things that interested me most, to do the creative work that I loved and wanted to make my career. Every project and decision was burdened with the weight of, “this needs to be good, or I will never achieve my dreams, I will never be happy, and people won’t like or respect me.” I’ve missed out on so much time I could’ve been spending making art and doing creative work that I love, and probably getting better at it, because I was terrified of what making something bad would say about me and my future.
Perfectionism is something I’ve struggled with my whole life, but I never considered myself a perfectionist. See, I never felt like I needed things to be perfect. I simply felt that the world demanded perfection from me, and in fear I acted accordingly.
Over the last couple years, living on my own with my first steady, low-stress job, I’ve finally had the mental and emotional bandwidth to stop simply living to survive and to start dissecting why I feel the ways I do. And part of that has been confronting the guilt I feel over not being more successful or not being “further ahead” in life. Like I said, I grew up with a lot of privilege — and from an early age, I knew that. I knew that I had all the resources and safety and opportunity to do well, and so I felt like I had no excuse if I failed. Failure was an indictment of my ability and my value as a person.
And the definitions of failure were always clear. I was raised by my parents, but I was also raised by the systems that governed my life, that shaped my understanding of the world and my place in it. School, the church, capitalist society — they all had clear rules, and drove home clear consequences should you fail to abide them. Get bad grades? Get held back, fall behind everyone else, lose your friends, miss out on scholarships and admittance to good institutions. Do whatever the church constitutes sin? Hurt other people, hurt yourself, hurt God. Fail to repent? Lose your church community, your family, your place in heaven. Be less than the best at whatever career you choose? Miss out on the good jobs, be miserable in your work, struggle to pay the bills, live life to survive, be stressed and miserable.
Fail to follow the rules? Live an irreversibly worse life.
It’s taken me this long to realize how many of these rules and the threats behind them, implicit or explicit, are lies. These institutions — schools, religion, capitalism — may have an inordinate amount of power over our lives, but even so, they don’t get to define the right way to live, nor can they determine what has or hasn’t value.
School teaches us, by assigning a quantifiable grade value to every test, assignment, and task we complete, that learning and success are about following the rules, and that failure is something to be avoided at all costs, because it's a stain on your record. In reality, failure (that is, not immediately doing everything correct or understanding everything fully) is a vital part of learning, and the measurement of success is not in our ability to retain and regurgitate information but in our mastery of skills and concepts. Academic institutions damage our ability and motivation to learn by not giving us the space to fail without consequence, and instead teach us how to survive and game a system that demands perfection by its very design. We are taught to live in fear of failure rather than in the pursuit of success, or of our innate passions and curiosities.
Large religious institutions like the church teach us that there are specific, unfailing, and unchanging rules for what it means to live a good life, and that they and only they can tell you what those rules are. I’m not going to deny the existence of objective moral truths, nor the value of the church's institutional and historical wisdom, nor the good it has done in wielding its power for effecting positive societal change. But institutional wisdom can only do so much to guide us. An organization largely led by older, celibate men, well-versed in academic theology and not much else, can’t reasonably determine what’s right for all people — couples, women, young people, gay people, trans people. If an institution refuses to listen to the communities it serves, then it fails to serve them. And when an institution with that much power fails its people, those people suffer — through social and political persecution, through not receiving the attention and resources and services they need, through a denial of their experiences and identities, and through pervasive systemic abuses that persist because they maintain the current structure of power. Ultimately, learning what’s right and wrong is incumbent on individuals and their communities listening, to themselves and to each other.
Capitalism (at least ostensibly) teaches us that living a good, safe, and successful life is the natural result of honest, hard work. What’s usually left out of this explanation is how frequently and massively the system privileges certain people — namely, white people, cis men, English speakers, etc., and above all, the wealthy — at the expense of everyone else. No amount of hard work is going to lift you out of poverty if we live at the mercy of systems that actively work against the poor. No amount of hard work is going to guarantee you a stable and safe life if the system puts all the power in the hands of the wealthy and incentivizes greed and selfishness. Capitalism and its proponents want us to believe that it’s the best, fairest system that we’ve got, and that in a free market everything will just sort itself out. But in reality, capitalism commodifies everything — food, shelter, healthcare, safety, and privacy are not rights, but things to be bought and sold, privileging the highest bidder. Our time, our space, and even people themselves are treated as things with monetary value, and with the unchecked growth of capitalist society they become pawns in the hands of the rich, their corporations, and their shareholders, all in the pursuit of unending, unsustainable, greed-fueled growth. Capitalism is the system we live under right now, but to treat it with a staunch moral reverence, or even just accept it as an unmovable reality, serves no one but those already in power.
No amount of therapy or medication or mindfulness exercises or self-help books will change the realities that these systems impose upon us. Part of my personal mental health journey, and my growth as a person, has been learning and acknowledging that many of our mental illnesses and symptoms are logical, natural responses to a world that actively fights against us and forces us to live in ways that just aren’t healthy or good for human beings. But what therapy, medication, mindfulness, and so on can do is help us cope with the painful strictures of reality in healthy ways. For me, the work of therapy in particular has been to understand how these systems have affected and continue to affect me — my values, my goals, my sense of self and of what has worth — and, more importantly, how we don’t have to live according to the rules set out for us. These institutions may wield power, but at least some of that power exists in convincing us that we must live a certain way, or that this is the way things are and must be. That, I think, is where we as individuals and communities can take power back. No matter how hard they may try to convince us otherwise, we get to decide what a successful life looks like. We get to decide what it means to be deserving, how to structure a just society, and where we place our value. We get to decide what, whom, and how to love.
For most of my life I was convinced that the only way I would be happy as an adult is to get a dream job doing something I love and making good money at it. I was convinced that there was only one real path to get there. I was convinced that failing to follow the rules set out for me would lead only to suffering, isolation, stress, and low self-worth. I was wrong on all fronts. In fact, trying to live by these rules and notions pretty consistently led to everything I was trying to avoid. It’s only been recently that I’ve started to not only see and understand the systems that govern our society for what they are, but also learn how to live my life according to what makes sense for me, what makes me feel happy and fulfilled.
The truth is, I’m still in the beginning stages of that process, and I’m currently at a loss for what I want my future to look like — and that scares me, a lot. But in my better moments, when the light of friendship and beauty and creativity illuminates my world, the future feels not just scary, but exciting. Hopeful. Because when you unshackle yourself from the strictures that have been keeping you narrow-minded and heavy-hearted, suddenly the world feels larger and your body feels lighter. Suddenly the future is not a known quantity, but a wide open unknown filled with opportunity. It’s felt genuinely so good to look ahead and, for the first time, think, “I get to choose what my life looks like.” My life feels like it’s my own, more than it ever has.
I still struggle every day, every week. I’m still scared, like, all the time. But I also still go to therapy. I still journal. I still reach out to my friends when I need help. I try to appreciate all that I have, and some days I'm really happy. And what has kept revealing itself to be true amidst all of this is, learning and growth never stops. I no longer believe there will ever be a point where I get it. Where I know everything I need to know, and I can regale the younger generations with sage wisdom from a place of certainty and enlightenment. I believe uncertainty is a fundamental part of life, and while that can be frightening, it can also be thrilling and freeing. There is no end goal, so there is no clear win condition, which is scary to me — but there’s no fail condition, either, which is a weight lifted. And not being able to know everything also means that you’ll forever get to keep learning. And that sounds like a much more interesting and fun life to me than reaching your arbitrary goal, achieving whatever happiness is, and sitting back in your rocking chair until your time runs out.
My writing this post was partly spurred by watching this video from Hank Green. Definitely recommend giving it a watch.