I feel like my entire life has been a competition. Who makes which teams, who gets which grades, who gets in to which prep school, who gets which leadership positions, who has which SAT scores, who gets in to this school early, who gets this internship… the list goes on.
I feel like every phase of my life has been preparation for the next one, and then the next one, to the point where I am always looking ahead. Society, along with my surroundings and schools and whatever other external factors, has forced me into the mindset that the only way forward is to win. I have to be the best, the highest, the most, or else there’s no way to move on. It’s almost like a game, really. To beat the level and advance, you have to win the race or collect the most gold coins. And I know I’m not alone in feeling this way, because in today’s ultra competitive world, it often seems like you have to win, and keep winning, to be successful.
I have come to realize that this lifestyle is unsustainable, or at least not if you want to be a healthy, sane person. Upon reflecting why I’m so exhausted from life thus far (somewhere my mom is rolling her eyes and queuing her “tiny violins”), I’ve decided it is because I, along with many, if not most, of my peers, set ridiculous standards for myself in all aspects of my life, and I expect myself to continuously meet if not exceed them. This past school year, I decided that I needed to have a perfect GPA, a leadership position in my sorority, run a full marathon, have friends and go out several nights a week, be a campus brand ambassador, and somehow get enough sleep to function at a level that would achieve all of this. That’s literally crazy talk, except by doing this I would probably be just another average student at my school.
While I did accomplish a lot of these things (or at least to a certain degree, I’m not Wonder Woman), I came home at the end of the year utterly spent. I needed a solid month of sitting with my dog staring at a TV screen to recuperate, which is no way to live life. I’m sure there are those of you out there laughing at my feebleness because you actually did all of that and then a week later started an insane internship with 14-hour days. You all just go ahead, I’ll catch up eventually.
The sad part of this is, these standards have become the norm. Not even the norm, they’re maybe even the minimum now. It all just makes me wonder when we will reach our limits (if we have any, which my success-hungry, driven self says we don’t. TBD). Part of me says this is life, no sacrifice, no gain, this is the price of success, anything is possible if you work hard enough (kind of starting to question that one a bit. I mean, I worked really hard at math, yet I still can’t multiply 7s) blah, blah, blah. There’s another part of me that is starting to question how hard I push myself, but is also absolutely terrified to try any other option. Competition has been so forced into my DNA, that all I can imagine striving for is to be the best in everything I do. No highway option.
But what if there is another option? I feel that so many of my peers and I live by the idea of, “If you ain’t first, you’re last” (Ricky Bobby, you sage), but is it really so bad to not be first? Are these absurd standards worth all of the stress, anxiety, and whatever else they produce? Is winning even the only way to be successful (okay, obviously not, but go with the rhetorical questions here)? As I head back to another year of school, these are the thoughts that keep swirling in my mind. In all likelihood I will go back to being an OCD, type A student with crazy criterion for what it means to be successful in my life. But maybe by just questioning it, I can be a little kinder to myself and realize that if I’m not first, I’m fine.
