The other day I was sitting on my couch reading a book with a blanket over my lap while the rain pinged against the metal overhang outside my front stoop, and I realized something. I had one of those double take moments where it suddenly dawns on me that I’m totally content. They’re not that common, although they’re more common lately than they have been in the past.
Growing up the way I did, I put a high value on success, and I had certain ideas about what it would look like to me. To be honest, I thought I would have way more money. At least some form of property outside 60% ownership of a 7 year old Honda with one side view mirror. But no, I reached my peak in a 700 square foot cottage in Portland.
Success does have a financial element. I mean, I needed to make enough money to sustain the kind of life where I can take Wednesday morning off and read on the couch in the rain. I need a certain amount of capital to keep myself healthy, to safeguard against the inevitable calamities of life. But that’s not all of it. I’ve started to realize that success is a majority emotional condition.
I’ve had other moments. Ones with crowds. And money. Not a lot. Way more than the majority of people in the world would have, but way less than a lot of Americans will have. Just enough so that when I think of the best days of my life, the money and the crowds could be on the list. But they never are. There are days where I’ve been happier, certainly days that were more exciting and interesting. But best days of my life seem to center around the quiet moments I spend reading alone, usually on a break from a grueling schedule of goal-oriented hard work.
The difference between what I need and what I sometimes think I need is galactic. Colossal.
So the recipe for my success is intellectually and physically challenging work, infused with forward momentum, hard-earned personal space, and downtime. And, of course, all the blood, sweat, and tears that make it possible for me to get to a place where I have the time, energy and resources to do goal-oriented work in the first place.
The most miserable times in my life haven’t been because of hardship. They’ve been because of a real or imagined lack of options.
I’m never happier than when I feel like I have choices, and that I’m making the right ones. Add in just the right amount of shitty circumstances I have to rise above and I’m over the moon.
I feel like more of a success now than I did on the most commercially viable day of my career. There’s no contest. When I make the choices in my life, when I sink or swim on my own merit, I feel like an honest person, and I feel like a winner. Everything else is just decoration. It doesn’t have anything to do with my worth.
I used to think that I had to stay at my soul-crushing job in order to learn not to tie my self-worth to my job title. That by being a lowly cog, I’d find the humility I needed to be a good worker. What a crock of shit. I stayed at that job out of fear. It worked out in the end, but I put myself through a lot of misery because I was too afraid to walk away from a place I hated more every day.
I already knew that in order to develop self esteem, I had to do esteem-able things on the personal level, what I didn’t realize was that in order to have esteem in my work, I had to do esteem-able work. And that esteem-able work doesn’t have anything to do with my job description. In the last year I have pushed my mental, physical and emotional limits getting my legs under me as a freelancer. I was determined to learn from every mistake I made. I threw myself into my work. I humbled myself, not for humility’s sake, but because the job required it, and I would rather do good work than hide behind my ego. And over the course of that effort, I’ve learned, not what my clients can do for me, but what I can do for them.
A year ago if you had asked me if I felt obligated to do a certain kind of work, I would have acted like I felt obligated to be a marketer. And maybe I did on some level. But I’ve been out here. I know the kind of shit other people are passing off as work, and I know what I have to offer people. I know why I’m here. Not in a cosmic sense, but in a professional sense. I know why I do the work I do, and I feel obligated to do it because I’m good. I’m better than most. No job title or pay grade will ever compare to that. I do esteem-able work. Not for the first time, but for the first time in a long time. And not because the work I did before wasn’t good. I just didn’t know why I mattered in the equation. Now I do.
It’s the difference between spending my pre-teen years sitting around wondering how I could be the kind of girl a boy would like, and making the decision to be the kind of girl I would like, and damn what the boys think.
If I have a gig, or if I don’t have a gig. If I’m doing what I’m good at, or I’m sweeping the floor. I know who I am now. It’s a powerful feeling.