status anxiety and other foibles

The good news is that I lived through last week's illness. The bad news is that in all my lethargy I started feeling really down on myself for not accomplishing enough. I know I should cut myself a break for the past few days, considering I was dramatically laid out upon death's door. But even when I'm perfectly healthy, I shudder at the amount of time I waste between projects. Not that I technically need to be producing anything else, but I feel guilty when I don't write or do something for an entire day. What is that about? Why am i putting this pressure on myself?

I've been re-reading Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety and realizing that it's quite likely I'm suffering from this. The more I see other people accomplishing, the more pressure I feel to succeed. The logical part of my brain recognizes the futility. The other is busy using disparaging adjectives to describe my lackluster efforts. I think part of it is because I always imagined I'd have done something significant by 25. That number is completely arbitrary, but my younger self thought that age seemed far enough away to have time to make my mark. Well, 25 came and went, and I haven't done whatever it is I thought I was going to do that was going to set the world aflame. How incredibly disappointing. Of course I wouldn't be disappointed if I hadn't set myself up for such a letdown in the first place. Defining the "thing" might have helped, too. 

From the time I started school, I was driven. But being driven as a student is not the same thing as being driven in the real world. Adults forgo sleep and seem to have less time for amusing high jinks. I always suspected this was the case and hid within the walls of academia for as long as possible. But almost three years out of grad school, I've since encountered people with so much passion and determination in their various fields that they seem almost other-worldly--sometimes in a good way and sometimes not. I envy the drive, but i've always felt frightened by some of the fervor to make things happen for the sake of "being successful." This is what I want to avoid. No matter how much anxiety I feel over my own lack of flame-lighting accomplishments, I would hate to think that I'd sacrifice my happiness to measure up to some warped, pre-conceived notion of success that probably isn't even wholly mine in the first place. Of course, this is exactly what I'm doing. How tragic it is that we all seem to do just the things we try so hard to avoid. 

No more. It's time to redirect my attention. Even on my best days, I'm not curing cancer. I could feel pretty badly about that if I really wanted to, but what would be the point? It's just about as ridiculous as comparing my worth to the successes of anyone else. But can I stop? Maybe. In the meantime, if everyone else could just slow down and stop being so damn ambitious, that would really help my self-esteem.