Ladders but also Snakes
Playing it the wrong way round
Quick note about this post - I wrote it last week and hadn’t posted it yet because I felt like my posts seem so self-obsessed, which they arguably are. There’s still a good reason for why I write them though, and I wanted to write a post explaining that first. However, as I haven’t gotten around to doing that yet and probably won’t until next week or so, I thought I’d go ahead and post this one anyway. You probably didn’t need this disclaimer. Apparently I did. Writing in public is hard sometimes!
When I think back to the things I am most proud of, it’s when I’ve done things that people wouldn’t have expected or were out of the ordinary. To be fair, I also don’t have a huge amount of conventional success stories to flaunt, so there’s that too. I was very rarely top of the class, I’ve never been promoted, and due to my highly intense but often short-lived obsessions with a variety of topics, I seldom stick to something long enough to become an expert. Sad, but true. However, I do have quite a few good stories to tell.
Sometimes I worry that my ever-changing enthusiasm will render me unreliable or untrustworthy - not in the sense of keeping secrets or telling lies - but rather that people will stop supporting new endeavours, will assume that a few weeks later it’ll be old news anyway, seeing as I seem to go through life on a bouncy ball, jumping from one idea to the next. Some I act on, some stagnate at the stage of manic research on my phone held inches away from my face while I lie wide awake in bed in the middle of the night, some develop into plausible undertakings which I bore my friends and family to death about to the point where even I start psychoanalysing whether this can in fact be the right path, considering I am still talking about it, rather than acting on it. Oh, the exhaustion of my brain.
Maybe I just enjoy the process more than the result. Maybe studying law wasn’t for the point of becoming an expert in a certain area and developing that expertise in a nine-to-five for decades on end. Maybe I’m playing some weird game of Snakes and Ladders where the snakes are just as welcome as the ladders. As you can imagine, this makes me HORRIBLE at team sports. It also makes my cv look like I have issues.
In a way it’s tragic that I can invest so much time and energy into something like law, only to then not care that deeply about it. I was really pretty good at some aspects of my studies, albeit usually at aspects that were pretty irrelevant for the most relevant exams, unfortunately. But actually applying the law, as I do at work? Decent. I’m decent at it, but it’s nothing to write home about. I’ll get the job done, no question, but I’m not outstanding at it. And I’m OK with that. I don’t need to ace every aspect of my life.
Winning for me isn’t an amazing career, it’s making people stop and think. Winning is people remembering me because I did something weird, but something weird that made sense.
By the way, I don’t choose to live like this, it’s not voluntary. Sometimes I wish I could be more professionally ambitious. Sometimes I wouldn’t mind being able to tell someone that I had achieved a certain milestone and to receive the recognition and respect of the socially recognised accomplishment. But it’s become very clear to me over the years that that’s not how I function, in which case, so be it.
I can’t be the only person who feels like this, who feels like they can’t or won’t invest all of their time and energy in reaching the next level. If setting and reaching goals gives you pleasure, then go for it. We do need people like that. If it’s not working out for you but you’re afraid to change your approach, please know that it’s totally fine on the other side, too.
As for me, I’m going to try and continue letting go of my or our preconceptions of how things are supposed to go, and to accept the fact that I don’t have one thing that I’m working towards. I’ll just carry on accumulating random experiences and random stories that hopefully make people listen, and hopefully also make people laugh, because that’s just so much more fun.
Because also let’s be honest - it’s not like I have any other choice anyway.
It is a good thing. This is what the ZEN masters say: you are in exactly the right place and in exactly the right way right now. You don't have to take anything away or add anything. But most of the time we forget that and then it's hard to get there.