Best at Nothing
I’ve spent a large...okay massive part of my life...okay! My whole life, damn, trying to be the best. I wanted to be the best at singing, at dancing and reading and writing and pretty much anything else. Any time I watched a movie with a female lead with a kickass job, I’d think, “Hey, I could totally do that, if I wanted to.” I can be an Elle Woods lawyer, or a Meredith Grey doctor, or a Sandra Bullock FBI agent. Every time I watched a “powerful woman” movie, I would spend the next couple of weeks wanting to be that thing. I’d research how to get started in that field, and where I could get the education I needed, and I knew that I would be the best lawyer/doctor/FBI agent the world had ever seen. Then after a few weeks, I’d lose interest or watch a different movie and go on to try to become the best at that thing.
Now hear me out, I’m not saying that I couldn’t do those things, or that I couldn’t possibly be the best at them. But wanting to be the best weighed on my shoulders more and more with every new dream career I’d have. I have 3 siblings, all of whom went to college, and graduated with a degree in something they really really wanted to do.
I took a gap year, thinking I’d go straight into the workforce and see what I wanted to do by starting at the bottom. Entry level jobs could show me the ladder I could climb by first going to college. Eventually I missed being in school (if you’ve taken a gap year that wasn’t centered around learning, you’ll understand) where I was learning every day and constantly working to improve myself. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I went to community college for mechanical engineering, because that was something I’d always been interested in. Then I switched to history, with plans to go to law school. I switched a few more times until I had gotten enough credits to earn a degree. The degree I ended up with was an Associate’s degree in University Studies. Basically a piece of paper saying “You took some classes here.”
I tried many more things after that. Went to a semester at a four year school for International Business, did sales jobs, teaching music, nannying, restaurants, hookah lounges, call centers, you name it. But I was always over-incumbered by these giant weights that I had put on my shoulders of needing to be the best. I worked multiple jobs at a time, hoping to succeed by sheer numbers alone. The anxiety ended up getting to me and I wound up in the hospital. I went to a group therapy center after being discharged and wound up making an insane realization that I had never thought of before. You paying attention? Here it is:
We don’t have to be the best at everything.
We don’t have to be the best at ANYTHING.
As long as we’re enjoying what we’re doing, and trying our hardest, who cares what ‘place’ we’re in?
As soon as that entered my mind, my shoulders relaxed, and so much of the anxiety I’d been carrying fell to the ground in heaps. I felt as though I’d been lifted out of a tar pit. I could move freely, I could think about things uninhibitedly.
Now I’m not trying to say that wanted to be the best is bad, or that anyone should stop trying their hardest because being the best isn’t important. The message of this blog post is that the pressure you’re feeling to be better than everyone else is misplaced. If you’re going to put pressure on anything, why not putting it toward finding the things you enjoy the most? It’s like when you’re a kid and the teacher says whoever has the most fun, wins. Although I’m aware that this is a cop-out so that teachers don’t have to keep score, it rings true for me, and it has turned my whole life around.
Just be the best at being what you want to be.