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silveradept[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.
It would be a valid argument to say that I set my ambition and expectations too high. The spot where I should have started from was working on the interpersonal level and then being delighted if what I was doing somehow went up to a level that's more widely effective or more distributed in its impact. If I were starting from a place where what I was expected to do with my life was to do my job well and be a good person to others, then the things that went beyond that would be lovely surprises to be cherished and to get the warm and fuzzies about. And if I had a more realistic picture of what I was likely to achieve in the time I have as a mortal being, them I could be happier about all of it all throughout my life. Because I was exposed to messaging as a youngling that I would be able to achieve a lot more, and the social and media messaging that's pretty impressively relentless about all these other people who have been living their lives to the fullest potential, can get any partner they want, started with nothing and made billions of dollars, or even those who trusted in Jesus and he provided them with untold wealth and riches, discounting for the moment the people who say these things and then pivot to
It turns out, at least in this stage of late capitalism, that if you don't start with an obscene amount of wealth, or your parents aren't already wealthy or famous themselves, the likelihood that you're going to achieve those things is pretty low. It certainly does happen. Usually at the end of a grueling gauntlet that was started for someone long before they were of age to fully understand the decisions being made for them. (And a lot of those kids don't finish the gauntlet, either because they decide they're no longer interested in doing it, or because someone else has decided for them they're not going to finish it.) Or by successfully managing to do a series of steps that lead to fame and fortune in a profession, or a side hustle, or some other method, and succeed at them, a feat sufficiently improbable as to be a rounding error off of impossible for anyone who didn't already have enough resources and assets to continually try things until they work, get bought out, or manage to loss-lead their way into becoming a monopoly.
So, not having been trained for sport from the beginning, and not having gone into a profession like business, politics, law, writing, or acting, and not having moved to places where those professions are in high demand, or where someone might be able to do things like acting or writing, I wasn't exactly putting myself in a position to become a memorable person. Still, because of that social messaging, I thought that even if I didn't become famous-famous, I could at least rise to the level of being recognized in my profession as someone important or who might grace a magazine cover or be recognized as a Mover and Shaker. That kind of thing, though, required doing something extraordinary, even beyond the extraordinary that the library profession is on a daily basis. If there were a prominent program or a high-profile grant or if I were some kind of administrator doing wonderful things for my library or library system, that might be enough to get the publications to sit up and take notice, but there are no Movers and Shakers awards given out to those who do their jobs well, day in and day out. There aren't really even any organizational awards, other than the longevity awards, given out for people who do their job well, day in and day out, and who don't stand out in any memorable or particular way.
Having failed to put myself in a position to be known historically, societally, or even organizationally (even with having achieved some great things, alone and in concert with others), the last bastion of hope there is individually having done great things for others. Which, well, if you've been around enough, you know that I tend to complain a lot about how the stories of how the librarian helped someone else in a big way rarely ever make it back to the librarian themselves. Some of that is because the timeframe for effects is often very long, and tracing the line of influence over the years becomes harder to do. The other part is that, at least in USian culture, service and support staffers are generally considered invisible when they're doing their jobs correctly. They get thanked plenty fine while they're in the middle of doing the thing, but someone's not likely to remember who the waitstaff was when you had the transcendent meal that gave you the idea to make an entire show from a ketchup blob on a napkin. (And for as much as we have stories about very high tips or where the extra credit question on the exam is the name of the person who cleans the classroom, those are very definitely outliers georg situations.)
And that means I'm down to doing great things in my personal life. There are bits of interesting trivia about my life, yes, like being on public access television for a quiz show repeatedly throughout my high school career, or being on national television for a Rose Parade (for a few seconds) or getting to play in an ensemble conducted by John Williams (yes, that John Williams). Writing some fic, some of it well received, some of it less enthusiastically received. Being a decent person to the people around me. Although, bad relationship and the recovery from sometimes makes the feeling of being a decent person seem like it's failed, at least in that regard, even if it might be doing well with other ones or with other attempts at being a decent person to those around me.
And there's also that final expectation that gets flung around, even though my family has luckily not been pushing extremely hard on that idea: marriage and children. It is woven very tightly into USian culture that every person will eventually find the person that is best suited to them and then join together with them in a religious marriage before doing their best to produce children to raise, or, barring that, they will at least do the marriage when it becomes clear that there will be children to take care of, even if neither of the parties involved actually wants children. The messaging around kids is often, even at its harshest, one of "yes, it's a struggle, but it's a blessing to have the children that I love and I will do what it takes to take care of them." (Unless it's a white person who wants to do a racism, then you'll hear all about how people of other colors are outbreeding white people and depending on the government to subsidize their living situations as they mismanage the money and abuse it neglect the children.) There's now a little bit of space outside of this narrative for perceived women to be childfree, under the rhetoric of bodily autonomy, and at least one strain of historical (and maybe current) pushback against expanding marriage to include more genders than one man and one woman on the argument that marriage is for children and couples that can't reproduce with PIV shouldn't be allowed to have many of the civil benefits of a marriage. But for the most part, even in comedies with overbearing parents constantly inquiring about when the grandchildren are going to arrive, raising children is seen as both an unquestioned good and especially as the way that men get to pass their values and their legacy on to the next generation. Even though I get my fill of getting to see and work with children as part of my profession, there's still an expectation there that in addition to my house in the suburbs with the white picket fence, I'm supposed to have my beautiful wife and my 2.5 children or I will not have achieved the true American Dream. Yes, even in this economy (even though there are a lot of people there who either refuse to take off the rose-colored glasses about what living in these times is like or who think that someone expressing concern about their own viability is a perfect target to convert to the cult of Doing a Racism and a Misogyny by blaming all the women and the not-white people for stealing the birthright of the white man.)
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.
It would be a valid argument to say that I set my ambition and expectations too high. The spot where I should have started from was working on the interpersonal level and then being delighted if what I was doing somehow went up to a level that's more widely effective or more distributed in its impact. If I were starting from a place where what I was expected to do with my life was to do my job well and be a good person to others, then the things that went beyond that would be lovely surprises to be cherished and to get the warm and fuzzies about. And if I had a more realistic picture of what I was likely to achieve in the time I have as a mortal being, them I could be happier about all of it all throughout my life. Because I was exposed to messaging as a youngling that I would be able to achieve a lot more, and the social and media messaging that's pretty impressively relentless about all these other people who have been living their lives to the fullest potential, can get any partner they want, started with nothing and made billions of dollars, or even those who trusted in Jesus and he provided them with untold wealth and riches, discounting for the moment the people who say these things and then pivot to
Take a few seconds NOW to fill in and mail the coupon at right, and you will receive at once my FREE book—"Everlasting Health and Strength" that PROVES with actual snap-shots what "Dynamic Tension" has done for others—what it can do for YOU!then I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the entirety of the messaging designed to make me feel inadequate about myself and what I've done compared to what my potential could have been…elided…several of the other truths and potentials that I would also have needed to have to achieve this storybook narrative.
It turns out, at least in this stage of late capitalism, that if you don't start with an obscene amount of wealth, or your parents aren't already wealthy or famous themselves, the likelihood that you're going to achieve those things is pretty low. It certainly does happen. Usually at the end of a grueling gauntlet that was started for someone long before they were of age to fully understand the decisions being made for them. (And a lot of those kids don't finish the gauntlet, either because they decide they're no longer interested in doing it, or because someone else has decided for them they're not going to finish it.) Or by successfully managing to do a series of steps that lead to fame and fortune in a profession, or a side hustle, or some other method, and succeed at them, a feat sufficiently improbable as to be a rounding error off of impossible for anyone who didn't already have enough resources and assets to continually try things until they work, get bought out, or manage to loss-lead their way into becoming a monopoly.
So, not having been trained for sport from the beginning, and not having gone into a profession like business, politics, law, writing, or acting, and not having moved to places where those professions are in high demand, or where someone might be able to do things like acting or writing, I wasn't exactly putting myself in a position to become a memorable person. Still, because of that social messaging, I thought that even if I didn't become famous-famous, I could at least rise to the level of being recognized in my profession as someone important or who might grace a magazine cover or be recognized as a Mover and Shaker. That kind of thing, though, required doing something extraordinary, even beyond the extraordinary that the library profession is on a daily basis. If there were a prominent program or a high-profile grant or if I were some kind of administrator doing wonderful things for my library or library system, that might be enough to get the publications to sit up and take notice, but there are no Movers and Shakers awards given out to those who do their jobs well, day in and day out. There aren't really even any organizational awards, other than the longevity awards, given out for people who do their job well, day in and day out, and who don't stand out in any memorable or particular way.
Having failed to put myself in a position to be known historically, societally, or even organizationally (even with having achieved some great things, alone and in concert with others), the last bastion of hope there is individually having done great things for others. Which, well, if you've been around enough, you know that I tend to complain a lot about how the stories of how the librarian helped someone else in a big way rarely ever make it back to the librarian themselves. Some of that is because the timeframe for effects is often very long, and tracing the line of influence over the years becomes harder to do. The other part is that, at least in USian culture, service and support staffers are generally considered invisible when they're doing their jobs correctly. They get thanked plenty fine while they're in the middle of doing the thing, but someone's not likely to remember who the waitstaff was when you had the transcendent meal that gave you the idea to make an entire show from a ketchup blob on a napkin. (And for as much as we have stories about very high tips or where the extra credit question on the exam is the name of the person who cleans the classroom, those are very definitely outliers georg situations.)
And that means I'm down to doing great things in my personal life. There are bits of interesting trivia about my life, yes, like being on public access television for a quiz show repeatedly throughout my high school career, or being on national television for a Rose Parade (for a few seconds) or getting to play in an ensemble conducted by John Williams (yes, that John Williams). Writing some fic, some of it well received, some of it less enthusiastically received. Being a decent person to the people around me. Although, bad relationship and the recovery from sometimes makes the feeling of being a decent person seem like it's failed, at least in that regard, even if it might be doing well with other ones or with other attempts at being a decent person to those around me.
And there's also that final expectation that gets flung around, even though my family has luckily not been pushing extremely hard on that idea: marriage and children. It is woven very tightly into USian culture that every person will eventually find the person that is best suited to them and then join together with them in a religious marriage before doing their best to produce children to raise, or, barring that, they will at least do the marriage when it becomes clear that there will be children to take care of, even if neither of the parties involved actually wants children. The messaging around kids is often, even at its harshest, one of "yes, it's a struggle, but it's a blessing to have the children that I love and I will do what it takes to take care of them." (Unless it's a white person who wants to do a racism, then you'll hear all about how people of other colors are outbreeding white people and depending on the government to subsidize their living situations as they mismanage the money and abuse it neglect the children.) There's now a little bit of space outside of this narrative for perceived women to be childfree, under the rhetoric of bodily autonomy, and at least one strain of historical (and maybe current) pushback against expanding marriage to include more genders than one man and one woman on the argument that marriage is for children and couples that can't reproduce with PIV shouldn't be allowed to have many of the civil benefits of a marriage. But for the most part, even in comedies with overbearing parents constantly inquiring about when the grandchildren are going to arrive, raising children is seen as both an unquestioned good and especially as the way that men get to pass their values and their legacy on to the next generation. Even though I get my fill of getting to see and work with children as part of my profession, there's still an expectation there that in addition to my house in the suburbs with the white picket fence, I'm supposed to have my beautiful wife and my 2.5 children or I will not have achieved the true American Dream. Yes, even in this economy (even though there are a lot of people there who either refuse to take off the rose-colored glasses about what living in these times is like or who think that someone expressing concern about their own viability is a perfect target to convert to the cult of Doing a Racism and a Misogyny by blaming all the women and the not-white people for stealing the birthright of the white man.)
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.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-18 07:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-18 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-18 10:17 pm (UTC)Because yeah. We get sold a narrative (thought: look how close "narrate" and "narrow" are in spelling, and is there something there?) and the fact that the axioms are increasingly ridiculous doesn't change the fact that that's what we're Expected To Be. (FSVO "we", of course).
I will never be Tony Stark. Does that make me a failure?
no subject
Date: 2023-12-19 02:22 am (UTC)Not being Tony Stark is not necessarily a failure, but I'd bet there are people who believe that if you're not Elon Musk or MrBeast, you're a failure.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-19 02:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-19 03:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-19 01:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-19 07:03 pm (UTC)