Success! The Last List of a List-Addict
My schedule had constricted, so I dashed straight from my office to slouching my crisp-collared shirt and work slacks deep into the overstuffed chair in my therapist’s color neutral, warm sanctuary, and I said, “I don’t know how to succeed. I want to be myself, and I don’t know how I’ll know if I’ve succeeded.”
Twenty-something teams with a new kind of stress. Especially as culture shifts toward older marriage age, greater educational attainment, and employment statistics that send adults to live in their parents’ homes. It isn’t the stress of meeting expectations, anymore. The young adult feels the stress of creating expectations.
I’m a lister, a goal-setter, a planner. I’m results-oriented. In order to feel successful, I need to verb. That’s the twenty-four year long story – verb after verb after verb.
And my therapist tipped her head into an angle and said, “Success? When you said that, I felt surprised. My first question was – how would you fail at being yourself?”
I’ve set a lot of goals in my life, and I haven’t done it all, so I know failure well enough. I fail by not crossing everything off the lists. I fail by not attaining the goals. But, I sometimes realize my list has expanded to impossible or unrealistic length. I can’t go on thinking of the lists as my mark of success or failure, since sometimes something more important comes along (like sleep) and it’s a mark of my success as a human that I did not finish the list.
So, I fail in verbs. But, this time, the goal didn’t overflow with “memorize, finish, clean, mend.” It consisted of “be.” That icky little English scrap that writers avoid at all costs. “Be,” the nothing word of the author. “Be” is for boring.
I didn’t have a lot of experience with “being,” especially at doing well at “being.” So, how do I know if I succeed at it? As a noun instead of a series of verbs?
“I don’t know.”
She said, “What about that list of the ten things you like about yourself?” A few months ago, she had instructed me to write attributes I felt proud of, now on my phone’s lock screen. My mind reaching, I passed the list to her. “‘Empathic,'” she read. “What if you knew you were succeeding by whether or not your interactions with people were empathic? Or, ‘Creative’; maybe you know you’re succeeding by letting yourself be creative.”
“But, that’s so hard to operationalize and quantify. Operationalizing creates accountability. I don’t trust these things to my memory. What if I just forget who I want to be?”
That hour, together, we plotted, drafting a plan that sent me immediately from the Psychological Counseling Center across campus to the Barnes and Noble, from whence I emerged, after a very discriminating hour, with a journal. Green (for growth), simple (for timelessness), and cheap (I’m “responsible” – it’s on my list).
I walked twenty feet to a Starbucks where the work began. I drafted a series of twenty questions; dynamic, active, concrete, visibly muscular questions. Once a month, indefinitely, I will crack open the little green book to report in on how I accomplish “being.”
The first ten affirmed. They asked how, where, when I had shown each of my ten attributes. Things like –
-What have I done that was responsible?
-How has being well-read benefitted me this month?
-When did my compassion, my creativity, my sensitivity improve my world, my life?
etc.
The next three gave me room. They asked how I had grown and changed:
-What have I done that was new or different?
-How do I feel about that change?
-Is it something I want to continue? Why or why not?
Then, I asked if I had compromised. I asked where my actions had gone against my ten attributes (I combined a few to keep the number low):
-When haven’t my actions been compassionate or empathic?
-What did I do that acted against my conscience, my chosen roles, the Bible?
Finally, I wrote:
“Looking over this list, is there any action or trend you’ve begun that isn’t in line with who you want to be? What are you going to do?”
There. Every month, every change, every leaf and shoot of growth, I’ll know and evaluate. There’s room for growth, room for change. But, I won’t lose myself.
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Jolene Michelle
Quarter-Life Quandaries 