My husband Kurt comes to check on me. I am propped up in bed in a head bandage to prevent spinal fluid leakage, and a neck brace to protect my skull-to-shoulder fusion from breaking. I am supposed to be sleeping. Instead I am on my phone, searching the internet for a way out of my current situation.
“What are you looking for?” Kurt asks.
“Lindsey Vonn’s workout schedule, after her knee surgery,” I say.
Kurt laughs and asks, “You’re just days out of surgery and you want to work out like an Olympic downhill skier?”
“I am tired of sitting here, doing nothing. Strong people get up and do something to heal faster. They don’t just lie here and wait.”
“Is that true? I bet if Lindsey Vonn had two craniotomies and a neck fusion, she’d lie down for a few days.”
I am not convinced. The only way I know to get through something difficult is to get back up and push through the pain. I feel like if I just work harder, I can throw off the bed covers, rip off the neck brace, and go home.
In the hero’s journey, the hero has sword fights and lightsaber battles to fend off bad guys. My battles are internal. I fend off fear and anxiety. I barely move an inch.
Do I deserve to be here if I can’t do anything?
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Let’s look back in order to go forward.
It helps to start at the beginning.
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1
I come from a long line of strong women. My mother’s mother taught me to hold a shovel; my father’s mother taught me to hold a cigarette. My mother taught me to hold my own. Her motto was, “Love many. Trust few. Always paddle your own canoe.” They were widows and divorcées, single mothers who worshipped hard work and self-reliance. They loved me deeply, fiercely. In their eyes, there was nothing I could not do.
These brave women raised me to believe that I could be anything I wanted to be. But the way I internalized that message was that I must be great at everything. And there were many times that I didn’t feel capable of being great. All I ever saw were the outer, perfect performances of women in my life: my grandmother, receiving awards for her athleticism; my mother, in a black graduation gown, receiving her second advanced degree; my stepmother, smiling brightly as she effortlessly prepared a five-course meal. I never heard about their struggles, so I thought that the confusion I experienced was uniquely mine. I assumed everyone else knew exactly what she was doing.
My daughter, at ten, believes that she must be great at everything, too. She and I understand that women are praised for their beauty or their extraordinary accomplishments. When we don’t feel beautiful and when we aren’t the top performer, we don’t question our culture’s values—we question our worth. One evening, she sat in the fetal position on our couch, refusing to go to dance class.
“I’m not good enough. I’ll never be good enough,” she said.
“Ouch,” I responded, and tried to get eye contact, but she was looking down and away. I knew that she didn’t get the part she desperately wanted in the winter show. But to her, it wasn’t just a setback. It was proof that she was flawed, even broken. She felt that if she didn’t show up to class, no one would notice. She wanted to give up at the age of ten.
She wasn’t just talking about dance. I had heard her say these things before when she made a mistake on her homework or couldn’t read as fast as her friends. “Mama, there is something wrong with me. Everyone else can do it, but I can’t.”
I didn’t say a thing. I moved next to her on the couch and lifted her narrow shoulders onto my lap. She was wearing purple leggings and a blue t-shirt with “Dreams come true” written in sequins. I knew the feeling of not being good enough. It woke me up at three in the morning with the pain of how I swallowed what I wanted to say in an important meeting, or how I was falling short of everyone’s expectations at home. But I had long ago learned to hide that pain and to keep driving forward believing that if I kept moving, no one would notice that I was not the leader or the mother that people were counting on. I would only slow down when I got sick. Then I got so sick from the stress that I had to face my fear of letting everyone down, or die. There is nothing benign about believing we have to earn our value on the planet.
The opposite of joy is not sadness; it’s perfectionism.
I don’t mean the have-to-have-your-nails-done-to-go-to-the-store kind of perfectionism. What concerns me is the kind of perfectionism that says, “I’m so sure I’m going to be terrible, I won’t even try.” Or the kind that researcher Brené Brown points out as our constant drive to earn approval and to “please. perform. perfect. prove.”
The world doesn’t need us to be perfect; it just needs us to contribute to the common good.
I listened to my daughter cry some more. It made me very uncomfortable to do nothing but hold her. I had to trust that she would find her way, even when the world was constantly telling her that to be average is to be worthless, and if you’re not the top, you are the bottom. Fear said, “You are a bad mother. Do something, anything. Make her suffering stop.”
I know Fear. She and I go way back. She always finds a way to make me worry about something. She comes in my room at night and says crisply in my ear, “You don’t have what it takes.” When I turned forty, she said, “Poor baby, you could have been somebody. But you missed your chance.” Fear has flawless skin and a red pen. She sees a way to improve everything, including this sentence.
“I’m so tired, Mama.”
“I know, I am too.” I am tired of striving, reaching, improving myself and everyone around me just so we can have an equal shot at belonging. My daughter and I sat on the couch together as the same questions swirled around us, unanswered.
What if I can’t keep up with the world’s expectations of me? Am I going to do what feels right, or what I have to do to keep my place on this planet?
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At seven years old, I know that the ticket to happiness is to make everyone proud. I am the youngest of three children and the only girl. I love my brothers, Jake and Derek. They are big and strong and good at everything. One morning, I am running down the sidewalk, trying to keep up with them. My feet are slapping the cement in red, leather, Mary Jane sandals. We are late for school. My brothers yell over their shoulders, “Keep up!” I am always slow. I am holding them back. My legs hurt. My backpack is heavy. It keeps hitting me in the head as I run.
They disappear through a gate into a stranger’s backyard. They have told me about this shortcut to school before, but I’ve never taken it. I open the gate. I have to make it across the backyard and to the fence. I hear a dog barking. It sounds like a mean dog with a big, low, deep bark. I put my head down and run. The dog barks and barks. I make it to the fence. I feel the chain links dig into my palms. My feet slip as I climb, but I make it to the top. My shirt catches on the top of the fence, but there is no time to loosen it. I hear a screen door open behind me.
The owner is coming out of his house. He is walking toward me, across the yard, yelling, “Hey!” There is not time to untangle my shirt. I swing both legs over and jump. My shirt rips. I land on my feet, then fall forward. My backpack and its weight push my body into the pavement. I taste blood. Then I hear the man yelling, “Hey! You!” I am up, running away from the yard, looking for my brothers. I can see the top of Derek’s head as he’s running behind the row of parked cars. He is crossing the street now. The light is yellow. I am running so fast my eyes water. I blink back the tears and lean forward. I make fists with my hands to pump my arms the way Jake showed me to. I run faster, faster. I make it before the light turns red, before the cars rush past me. Jake and Derek are standing there, smiling. Jake says, “You’re good. You’re