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[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#17: "I'm Going To Achieve Great Things."
Ah, well, this one stings a bit to admit that I no longer believe it fully. Because a lot of my upbringing has taken it as a given that I, as a person of many privileges, am going to go on to have great successes in my chosen profession and in my life. And that I am going to be able to claim that all of that greatness was due to my persistence, talent, and the brilliance of my work. Even though, as I get older, it becomes clearer and clearer to me that while I have enjoyed many privileges to get me to the position that I am in, I still lacked several more of the privileges that would have catapaulted me to notoriety and/or fame, and made decisions with my life that put me away from places where I would have amassed wealth, power, fame (and/or infamy), or any of the other things that would have turned me into someone worthy of being mentioned in the history books, or becoming a known name, or otherwise not fading into the depths of history as so many others have.
( So, you're having a calibration error again, you say? )
Even though I can tell how much of all of what was said to me was just that, a pitch, and I can see what those pitches are designed to make me do and feel about myself and the things I have done in my life, there's still some parts of me that believe it enough for me to feel disappointed say not having achieved some kind of historical pinnacle, or otherwise written my name into the history books, as is Right and Proper and My Due. Or even managed to do something that might be locally famous. Or that some far-flung archivist or academic is reading something that I wrote and citing it in their paper to prove something, somewhere. I went into a time of my life with the belief that I might defeat the odds, but there older I get, the more certain it seems that I will not achieve Great Things, or if I do, it will be because I successfully reframed my thinking so I no longer am disappointed in what I failed to do, but can take pride in what I have done.
#17: "I'm Going To Achieve Great Things."
Ah, well, this one stings a bit to admit that I no longer believe it fully. Because a lot of my upbringing has taken it as a given that I, as a person of many privileges, am going to go on to have great successes in my chosen profession and in my life. And that I am going to be able to claim that all of that greatness was due to my persistence, talent, and the brilliance of my work. Even though, as I get older, it becomes clearer and clearer to me that while I have enjoyed many privileges to get me to the position that I am in, I still lacked several more of the privileges that would have catapaulted me to notoriety and/or fame, and made decisions with my life that put me away from places where I would have amassed wealth, power, fame (and/or infamy), or any of the other things that would have turned me into someone worthy of being mentioned in the history books, or becoming a known name, or otherwise not fading into the depths of history as so many others have.
( So, you're having a calibration error again, you say? )
Even though I can tell how much of all of what was said to me was just that, a pitch, and I can see what those pitches are designed to make me do and feel about myself and the things I have done in my life, there's still some parts of me that believe it enough for me to feel disappointed say not having achieved some kind of historical pinnacle, or otherwise written my name into the history books, as is Right and Proper and My Due. Or even managed to do something that might be locally famous. Or that some far-flung archivist or academic is reading something that I wrote and citing it in their paper to prove something, somewhere. I went into a time of my life with the belief that I might defeat the odds, but there older I get, the more certain it seems that I will not achieve Great Things, or if I do, it will be because I successfully reframed my thinking so I no longer am disappointed in what I failed to do, but can take pride in what I have done.
