Pondering success: A follow-up post
A little over a month ago, I wrote a post about failure and why it’s necessary. It was mostly a rant, but today, I wanted to write about success (and how that can sometimes be just as scary).
Queue Hallmark-able quote. Photo by @drew_beamer from Unsplash.
“Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.”
There’s a really great TED Talk by Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love) on this same topic that I highly recommend watching. I wanted to give my own spin on this, though, in the wake of the success of some of my poems as of late.
“Success,” lightly, of course. Or perhaps I use that term rather loftily. I so often (and perhaps ignorantly) perceive success as achieving the lofty dreams I had as a six-year-old, wishing and hoping that one day I’d be a New York Times bestselling author, giving talks in bookstores where my fans would come asking for signatures, where my fiction novels would be made into critically acclaimed films, where I could live surviving on writing alone. Those were my dreams. Are they still attainable? Maybe. I hope so.
In Gilbert’s TED talk, she reflects on her success with Eat, Pray, Love and how success in this regard can also be daunting. Will her next work be just as good? What if it’s not? When I got my first acceptance email for a literary magazine, I was hoping it would be easy-breezy with acceptances. And for a minute, I was on a roll - I got accepted three more times in the next few months.
But I haven’t been accepted since then. I got loads of rejection emails for both my poems and my book. And I feel unhappy with simply being published in literary journals. The creeping taste of my childhood dreams sits at the tip of my tongue, but I haven’t quite swallowed. Is it a success if I haven’t achieved that just yet?
Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.
I think the problem is the sentiment that we can never be satisfied (see the cover photo for this blog post). Maybe this is fueled by a capitalist fervor engrained in our society, telling us that in order to be great, we must keep pushing to be greater and greater. That’s kind of sickening, isn’t it? To never be able to be satisfied with who we are, with the successes we’ve achieved, with our bodies or our brains? Like it or not, I’m plagued with this — and maybe you are, too. Like, damn, it’s pretty cool that I’ve been published in journals and that I’m going to start applying to grad schools, and that I’m happy and healthy and have a good job.
Something my boyfriend said to me has been sitting with me, though — a year ago, it was unfathomable that I could get published in a journal. It seemed impossible, but here I am with a few poems floating on the internet, not published by me, and I’m on the way to hopefully publishing a book. Just a year ago, that was impossible. Now, it’s fathomable. If that’s not a success, I don’t know what is.
I hope you’re all well! Be sure to leave a comment to let me know your thoughts on success. Also, check out my Patreon, subscribe to my blog, or just shoot me an email if you’re interested in chatting more. Can’t wait to hear from you soon!
