good-enough ambitions

No offense Mama, but maybe I want to accomplish something more than just be a therapist or a college professor. I don't think you can understand.

This came up in one of many conversations about ambition, perfectionism, and grades held in our kitchen over the past weeks. I was suggesting a fixation on achievement and grades could be really detrimental for kids. Frances was suggesting that her drive to achieve, which would lead to great things, was a serious priority for her. It sounded to her that because I think the pressure to perform is bad, I don't consider the fruits of that pressure to be important. Mama thinks everyone should chill out and stop striving for success all the time. I couldn't understand because I don't strive myself.

Being a psychotherapist who works with college students, especially college students studying and living in a high-pressure, achievement-oriented institution, has made me fear all talk of grades. The word ‘extracurricular’ makes a tendon in my neck start to stiffen and ache. Sure, I see the students who struggle with depression and anxiety. But the perspective they offer is often similar, reflecting a larger culture in which every moment has to be accounted for, made productive, utilized to set one up for success in The Future (and ideally also documented in a flattering light on Instagram). A grade on a quiz leads to a grade in a class, which leads to a better or worse GPA, which determines study abroad programs, fellowships, grad schools, jobs, and who knows what else, which determines salary, status, and power, which determines...well, that's when it all gets hazy. It's unclear what all this scrambling is for. But basically, if you let one thing slip, you could end up homeless. These are high stakes.

I fear the college experience for many students is dominated by pressures to keep pace in this grueling marathon. And since I see the ravages of the race first hand, when I come home and hear worries about grades from my own children, I tend to overreact. I fear for them. I throw up my hands and say things like grades are meaningless! And talking about your GPA is soul-crushing! And that's it, we're going off the grid!

Super helpful, I know. Probably part of being so stirred-up and preachy about the gaping maw at the center of our achievement culture that threatens to swallow children whole is that I kind of do understand Frances’s point of view. Deeply. I like to get an A, too.

I think my initial ambivalence about psychotherapy, back when I was in graduate school and considering a more advocacy/policy–oriented social work path, was not merely a political suspicion of medicalizing social problems (poor people don’t need antidepressants, they need better paying jobs!). I think my own ambition revolted. A career comprised of countless private conversations conducted in a small room? Conversations that I couldn’t talk about with anyone else? No recognition, no fame, no objective marker of success or progress? No good grades? Geez. Just muddy human interaction, conducted in obscurity. 

So much for the world stage. 

But I was drawn to it, despite multifaceted ambivalence. As I got older I was able to notice with greater clarity how meaningful this work is, how relationships are a powerful means of transformation, how feelings really are my métier. I discovered how thrilling a series of private conversations can be.

I’m not famous, it's true. Thankfully I love my job.

But you guys. Sometimes I would like to be famous. Achieve something of note! Make big things happen. Create something beautiful.

I don’t think those kinds of things require scrambling on a harrowing hamster wheel for the first 25 years of life. However. You might need a bit of drive. I often find myself promoting a kind of counter cultural perspective: let go of internalized achievement pressure; find more stillness; make space for clarity, for the strangeness and wonder of every day; accept limitations - embrace them, even. Everything good will flow from that. But when I saw myself through Frances's eyes, I knew my own tangles twist deep inside still. Does my own mediocrity, complasence, fear of risk-taking, and general middle-aged fatigue sit hiding in a closet, trying not to be noticed, at the heart of my personal anti-achievement campaign? Good lord, am I just making excuses for myself?

I compare my kids' experience to my own all the time. I can't seem to help it. I sit with my feet in the chilly damp grass on Saturday mornings, watching Gabriel's soccer games, trying to keep my cool when he darts towards the ball. It's just a game, right? For fun? Right? I see Frances’s ambition crackling all around her and I marvel. Great things. Yes! Reach for great things. Beatrice is assertive in a way I still can't hack at age 40. She tells kids to get out of the way and let her have the slide to herself. What else will she commandeer?

I delight in their accomplishments, their bold expression. But you dear ones: don’t get hurt. Or suffer. Or become anxious. Or mad at yourself when you fall short of the A. Or fail to notice the mystery and beauty of life because you are so focused on forward motion. 

I want them to be happy. I want them to be brilliant. I want them to be happy exercising their brilliance. I want the world to see them and love them as I do.

I want to protect them from the cult of success, and I want them to try really, really hard, because it's good to try hard. Because the world becomes more rich and complicated and marvelous and part of you when you do.

I want to blow gently on their flames, enough to help them burn brighter, but not so fiercely that they flicker out.

I definitely don't want to pressure them into being famous novelists/comic book artists/dancers/physicians/singers/scientists as a means to vicariously satisfy my own ambitions. Please, if you ever catch me at that - tell me to give it a rest.

Like Frances said, I'm just a therapist. Just a therapist in a college in a town in Pennsylvania, doing part-time good-enough work. It's not the stuff of dreams. It's one piece of my life, and despite any deep down doubts about the relative quiet of my professional achievements, it brings an ever-shifting meaning and depth to my days. It's like my last post, about returning to the same place over and over that can never be the same. My work affords a similar sense of surprising newness within the confines of the same two chairs, the same four walls, every day.

Most importantly, it allows me to take care of my family, which is, I suppose, where most of my ambition finds expression anyway. What would Frances, or my twelve year old self, make of that?