So, part two of “high achievers.”
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What most people don’t get is that it’s addictive.
Like, really addictive. Not the success. The threat of failure followed by… the escape? I don’t quite know what to call it. But it’s beautiful. That’s why you do all that stuff.
So that you can get way out over your skis, to the point that you feel it in your guts, like when you’re in a hospital waiting room waiting for someone who’s in surgery and what nobody wants to say is that everybody knows there’s a good chance they won’t pull through.
That’s how it feels. You get yourself into these situations, over and over. Every time, you’re like “Why—why did I do this? Why do I do this?” You tell yourself you don’t really mean to, but you really do mean to because you can’t give it up.
And each time everyone’s like, “OMG good luck, I would never try something like that but you, you’ll kill it!”
And you tell them “Oh I think this one’s gonna get me, I don’t know how this is going to go…” and really, you’re not being self-deprecating like everyone thinks you are—you legitimately believe you’re about to fail in a big way, that things are about to go south in a big way, and you’re spinning all these plates in the air like it’s a magic show and lifting heavy weights above your head and balancing like an angel on the head of a pin besides for weeks, maybe months, maybe even years depending on the folly level of what you’ve taken on.
You begin to have this dread, mixed with a certain kind of love, for the entire situation.
You put your head down and you just sort of toil on, a condemned person, you’re waiting for everything to collapse around you, for all the rocks that your pointless little cottage is made out of to fall right on your head and kill you, but it won’t be so bad because you’re on your ninth life anyway, by all rights you should have failed completely already, so completely that you’re just no longer viable anyway. So you’re on gifted time. So it’s somehow okay.
And you go in. Into that city, into that exam, into that institution, into that presentation, into that project, whatever. You do it even though by go-day you know you’re the world’s biggest idiot to keep tempting fate and you’re going to fail.
And then, by some miracle, you squeak it out. You squeak it the hell out.
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Maybe this is what separates the high achievers with clean houses and Financial Stability[TM] from the ones with messy houses and nothing but a lot of stilted stories to tell.
I’m the kind with a messy house. I was never all that disciplined, or all that wise. What I’ve been, mostly, is in love with getting way out over my skis to see if I can survive, and then managing to somehow. That ecstatic moment when you do somehow manage the narrow escape right on to the podium, in spite of it all… is crack.
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This post is apropos of me seeing this for the first time in a while.
Not in myself, but in my children. I just heard all of this, in slightly different words, from my daughter. Apple, tree, and all of that.
And even though it’s not me now—I sort of gave all that stuff up a bit when I became a parent—I can still feel it. Just being around it—the wild-eyed escape artist attempting their most daring (or is it mad) trick yet, pacing days before the Big Event knowing, absolutely knowing they’re going to fail right in front of a packed house. The level of intoxication, even second hand, is… like nothing else.
Like, it tastes good, like this inexplicable combination of fear, lunacy, determination, and cocksure posturing that’s half merely posturing insecurity and half the real deal.
I don’t know whether I did a great thing or a terrible thing in passing it on to my kids, but it’s certainly… a thing.
And to all the rest of you lunatics out there who know exactly what I’m talking about, cheers.
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Oh, re: the “pretentious” thing… I mean, it’s a personal blog. That I’ve kept online for 24 years. Even long after it became anachronistic. So the ship has sailed.