It’s hard to put into words, but ever since coming to college 2 years ago and becoming more independent, I have had a lot of things resurface and enhance my anxiety, depression, and eating disorder to a point where its just overtaken my life. I’ve been extremely successful in my academics and have been very active in my community, but I don’t feel like I’m enough for me. I’m not sure if that makes sense, but I’m just feeling really tired and really finding hard to keep pushing forward without enormous effort.
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I understand the feeling perfectly well. When is enough enough? What do you have to do to finally feel like I’ve achieved something? If you stop moving forward and pushing to get better, isn’t that just as bad as backsliding? Isn’t continuous improvement a good thing? If so, why does it feel like you’re always falling short and disappointing yourself?
I’ve struggled with this since middle school. With no good friends to speak of and nothing meaningful in my life, I was only as good as the work I did. Last year I finally labeled this as performance-based identity. When I put it in those terms, it was a bit sobering. No, there’s more to me than that, isn’t there? I don’t want to be one of those movie people who got their career and money and status at the cost of everything else. Besides, the money and the power and the notoriety are all so empty and cold. Anyone who’s watched a movie about a simple person moving to the big city to pursue a big job knows that.
When I identified and categorized it, I separated the performance-driven parts of me from the rest and started looking at who and what else I was. I’m more than a good worker who has tried exhaustively to shake off massive failure in college for the better part of a decade. I am a child of God, a good husband, a happy dog dad, a decent friend to a handful of people, a good son and brother, a curious mind, someone who has figured out a lot about himself and continues to do so, and someone who likes helping people. In fact, I’m so much more than a performance machine that the pendulum has swung and my job performance has lessened; but that’s given me the space to question who else I want to be, and my job performance is still satisfactory to the other people that matter. What was I breaking my neck for anyway? When I die, no one will remember me for how many projects I finished at work.
Now, what to do about all that is still tough. I’m still working on it. I’m not suggesting you tank your scholastic performance, and I’m not even suggesting that you go pick up pamphlets for all the extracurriculars and trying to create another part of your identity. Praise yourself when you do well on an assignment. Go fucking celebrate when you do well on something big, like an exam. Give yourself grace when you fall short of whatever grade or goal you have your eye on. Take what you know about your performance-driven self and set it aside–it won’t go anywhere–then look at who else you are. It may not be immediately obvious, and that’s okay too. You know you have the ambition and aptitude to succeed, so it’s okay to look for other parts of yourself too.
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