Do you ever tell yourself the story of your life, in your head? Do you ever revise the story as you go?
I do, all the time. I am not sure if the revisions are a kind of erasure and rewriting of history, or if they are a kind of re-interpretation of history, an improvement of perspective as time carries me farther and farther away and I can take a wider view.
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As a girl I was told, too often I think, that I would someday do Great Things: all the individual people meant well, or at least meant nothing serious, but the total accumulation of expectations weighed heavily.
At the same time I heard other things, too, and I think they carried the same weight: that I didn't know how to deal with people, that I didn't know how to make friends, that I wasn't naturally likeable, that the problem wasn't what I say but always how I say it, that I didn't know how to dress myself, that I was physically clumsy and physically lazy.
It wasn't my sibling's fault, and I know this, but I got compared to him a lot, and the message was something along these lines: You're pretty book-smart, but I'm a lot less worried about him than I am about you. I know he'll do well because he's doing fine in school and he knows how to get along with people. People like him.
(Who knows what he heard or didn't hear from the other side of those comparisons?)
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So, ultimately, I achieved some of the things I said out to do, and a lot of them were difficult and much of them were rewarding. I haven't (yet) accomplished any of the Great Things. I mean, plenty of Not-Too-Shabby things in that domain, but nothing world-changing. And then of course I stopped trying in that domain entirely; I quit it.
One of the things I'm gradually editing and rewriting in my story, though, is the column labeled "Accomplishments." And here's the reason.
I quit that other domain, in part, because I felt myself (more than most people! this isn't about you!) to be internally and invisibly disabled, hampered, struggling. I'm not talking about imposter syndrome, I'm not talking about struggling as a scientist, though of course there was imposter syndrome, and of course it is challenging to be a young scientist. I expected that, we should all expect that. I'm talking about feeling disabled as a human being who relates to others. I felt that I operated in a kind of impairment, that it was always going to take extra work, extra attention, extra care for me to hold my family together, or maybe to hold myself together enough. Deep down, I did not think I could do both things adequately. (No, not even when acknowledging that it's not just me who has to do the holding-together.)
I know and admire many parents who can, and who do; who don't just hold it together, who excel. I didn't think I could be one of them. A few years of parenting and sciencing at the same time only reinforced it for me.
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Weighing the opportunity cost now, I am trying to honor as accomplishments the relationships I have built. The girl who wasn't naturally likeable has been married twenty years to a very good spouse who, by all appearances, loves her dearly. The girl who was physically lazy is raising five lovely children. The girl who didn't know how to make friends, well, she doesn't have a lot of friends, but she has some very, very good friends, real ones, who have made a tremendous difference; with some effort (maybe more than most people need) she's kept the best of the ones that go way back, and still occasionally makes new ones.
These are things that I have worked hard for, and not things that were laid on me like weight, like expectations; they are unlooked-for gifts that I've thrown all my efforts to, in order to keep and steward them. I'm grateful for the opportunity. They will never belong on a CV, of course, but I'm telling this story to myself, and they go in.
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