Topped the continent? Sorry, it’s not enough
The title comes off as a bit immodest. Writing this about my (arguably) biggest milestone so far feels like confessing to a murder. To have mine judged as the best essay out of thousands of entries all over the continent came with a swarm of congratulations and a great deal of publicity. I am not ungrateful. Here is my dilemma:
Like beauty, success lies in the eyes of the beholder but the owner is blind.
And it isn’t just this owner. You do not have to look very far to find a figure that just would not stop. History is notched, most often by relentless characters who found neither comfort nor satisfaction in the feats of their prime: France will not let us forget Napoleon, Alexander the Great is forever intertwined with Persia, and even Hitler had his day in the sun. The list is inexhaustible. So are the number of times they have fallen prey to their ambition. And history glorifies that. Textbooks and tributes worship that. Friends and family adore that. Motivational speakers regurgitate that. Deep inside, we all want a bit of that. To etch our name into the rock of perpetuity.
Let me introduce the Mr. Hyde to Lady Success: congratulations feel like generic platitudes. Your sense of wonder fades. Paranoia becomes a close friend. It becomes harder to live up to yourself. What moved you before bewilders you. You press on, not because you want more, but because you don’t know when to stop. You are effectively detached from yourself. Yet the show must go on. And boy it does go on. I will not delve into the wormhole that is the aftermath.
Three years after that high, I have come to realize that I defined success in all the wrong ways. It is not a moment. It is not a ball in the back of the net.
It is the collective of all that happens from kickoff.
Despite everything, I still want the glam and the glory. Might I feel different when it arrives? Probably not. This is the moral of my musings: have enough every day. Enough effort. Enough gratitude. Enough worry. Enough joy. To expect all that to go away when we finally hit a target is to set the stage for our own disappointment.
Reaching the peak was not enough. Every step upwards was.
PS: This is only my third post on Medium and my woes have started to pile. Inspiration is hard to come by. Words fight back. I could write my will with more ease.
