Redefine Success
It’s perplexing to me,
how I can drive around in my car and feel wholly certain on what I want to write about the next time I’m at my desk…
how I can be sitting right here at this desk, working for someone else, and be thronging with visions for what to create next…
how laundry and vacuuming bring clarity and errands supply inspiration and a walk or a run consume me with potential
and yet…
Yet I swivel over to my personal machine after clocking out and I draw a blank. Confounded as to what exactly was so clear just a few moments ago…
Yet I pencil in a date to create and that day comes and my concrete ambitions turn into sand…
Yet my morning joe fuels my domestic checklist rather than my passions…
It’s as if I would much rather day dream about my ideas than to let them exist outside of myself.
It honestly feels like I’m just fucking lazy but I know that’s not the case - I work my ass off for the people who give me the opportunity.
I talk to my therapist about it and she says I need accountability, someone to report to, but that’s not fucking true - I gave it a try and told some friends my most ambitious daydreams and just felt foolish when years had gone by and I hadn’t made any headway to showcasing my revelations.
I sometimes wonder if it’s like an old boss used to taunt, a “fear of success”? Haha no, I don’t think so. I’m desperate for success, though success is relative and varies greatly depending on who I am around. In my home I define success by an ability to carry my weight finically and by the quality of our quality time. At work, I define success by autonomy and high levels of efficiency. Around my peers, I define success based on my level of being present and present contentment. But in the quiet, in the quiet I don’t really know what I would truly say success is but I am crushed by the weight of all of those daydreams and ambitions I have bottled up inside and I also know that letting them out at times has been disappointing and unfulfilling and embarrassing..
that the pursuit of my other visions of success are much much more attainable..
and I can’t help but to feel like I’m getting too old to feel this green. I am too long past college to not have expertly honed skills and a confident and articulate way of talking about my art. I am too smart to be this fucking dumb irl. Like what the fuck is happening to me?
I feel jaded that they never told me.
They never told me what happens in the healing.
Is it the years of therapy? Is it just the frontal cortex fully forming?
No one prepared me for the realization. For the recognition.
they say I should be more selfish with my time and oh I’ve done that
they say I should be more confident and give less of a fuck about what people think but I have had an entire lifetime of that
they say I should create without care of perception but I am have died on many a hill fervently defending my art because I meant it! But now I open up my portfolio and I see where I was wrong - where that shadow or the fucking ocean fish by the creek or that posing was all wrong.
I look back on my dossier of grudges and am disgusted at how I thought I could have been anything remotely right in the stances I took.
I consider the times where I was solely in pursuit of what I wanted to do and I think about all that was left by the wayside - the things I plowed right through and didn’t even notice.
