Or Was It?
Prefer to listen?
We all want to do something meaningful with our lives. How we define that varies wildly. But it could be said that we all want to leave this earth feeling like we’ve done something worth remembering. It might be for self serving purposes, especially in our younger years, but over time, we seem to develop a desire to leave something of a legacy behind – one that presents us in a light that feels “successful.”
Success in life, much like meaning in life, is up to interpretation. Let’s be honest, for most of us, our definitions change as we grow and transform. In elementary school, success looked like having the most sought after snack in the class and callouses the size of quarter from all that time on the monkey bars. In middle and high school, it was about having the most friends, the best friends, and just the right amount of drama to make it all more interesting. Then in college, it was about discovery, personal-growth, self-awareness, and becoming the adult I wanted to be.
In each season of life, I defined success differently. There was never a singular moment of transformation. I never went from one side of the spectrum to the opposite side. Growth and change were gradual in ways that, hopefully, suggested that I had refined my interpretation of success.
Growth and change were gradual...
Instead of “the most friends,” I found a handful of good friends. Instead of “the best grades” (which was never my reality but always my dream) I valued hard work and depth of learning, and instead of callouses on my hands from the monkey bars, I found value in the callouses earned by hard work and dedication to social justice.
But the many faces of “success” were never enough. They were always stifling and demanded I deny parts of myself. I tried being Outdoors-Kate, Buddhist-Kate, and Activist-Kate. Now, decades later, success feels like being un-label-able. “Kate” is just an identifier, like saying, “that flower is blue.” In truth, the flower doesn’t need to be told it’s blue. It just is. Labels are mostly a way to be more palatable to the outside world.
None of us is just one thing and when we feel a pull to define our success by fitting into a box, we stifle the multidimensional reality in all of us. It’s true that we move more seamlessly through society when we over simplify ourselves, but it’s also true that we are choosing to diminish ourselves for the convenience of the outside world.
It’s time to be inconvenient.
Be proud of the fact that you’re hard to box, that you’re complex, and a little “much.” We can be the eccentric artist/activist/parent/nurse/teacher while also being the person who cries every time they hear a song like, “This Is Me.” We don’t have to settle for being “easy to digest.” This is what “success” has come to mean for me – to allow myself to be seen, mess and all.
By all accounts, you and I are successful right here right now, while still walking a path towards an even more successful self that, one day, we can look back at and say, “Wow, I had no idea what success was.” That’s part of the process. That doing life on purpose. It’s not clean, or linear, or logical. It just isn’t. And the more we can appreciate it for the beautiful mess that it offers, the more we can accept our own definition of success no matter where we find ourselves in life.
