‘Why Do I Want to Amount to Something So Much?’

Dear Yanyi,

As a senior in college, I am becoming increasingly anxious about life after graduation. All of the uncertainty! Even though we’ve been through so much uncertainty already, I still can’t manage it well. I am an English and Creative Writing (Poetry) major. I’m also a Virgo, so I’ve planned post-grad as much as I can. I’ve applied to the Fulbright Scholarship for an English Teaching Assistantship, but after a while, I decided that I should have back-up plans just in case I don’t get the Fulbright Scholarship. Maybe I’m a pessimist? Anyway, I’ve lined up nine grad schools’ MFA programs, and then my plan C is another program that allows me to teach English abroad. With all of these plans, the only thing I can do is wait. But I’ve been alternating between optimism and pessimism extremely frequently. My mood has also been swinging around a lot too. One day, I feel like I’m on top of the world, like I can do anything, and I believe that I’ll get into BOTH the Fulbright and grad school. The next day, I feel like shit, like I can’t do anything, like none of my poems are “good enough” to be submitted, and I’ll amount to nothing. Why is it that I want to amount to something so much? Anyways, please advise me gently...

Sincerely,
Karen Z.

Dear KZ,

You say that you can’t manage uncertainty well, but I want to acknowledge how you already are in some ways: it’s prudent of you to recognize the crapshoot chances of getting either a Fulbright or into an MFA program, so having a backup plan that would be more immediately available to you after graduation makes a lot of sense. On the practical end, your Virgo placement has helped you make the best of uncertainty in the material world.

The feeling that you “can’t manage it well,” of course, isn’t about your practical plans. As you speak of the seesaw between being a shoe-in and a nobody, it seems as though your emotional stability is tethered to whether you’ll “amount to something.” There’s no practical backup for when you fail to perform as the person you’re supposed to be. So even though you’ve planned ahead for your material well-being, there will always be another uncertainty with the next thing you’re supposed to achieve.

Now, just to apply to nine MFA programs and a Fulbright, as you detail in your letter, is no easy feat. On the surface, as I said above, it’s a very practical way of steadying your prospects. Work, however, can also be a defense mechanism; it can be an impulse you follow for a sense of control in uncertainty. Working can preoccupy you from worrying about the future, but it also gives you an imaginary hold on it. If you’re feeling unsure about your future, doing one more MFA application will distract you and increase your odds, right?

It’s understandable why work is comforting. There’s a point A to a point B! There’s prerequisites and progressive tasks! There are roadmaps! More than something to do with your hands, work gives you a role to play; a way to be useful; a place in the world of your life.

Working towards the ever-moving next achievement, however, can also be so comforting that it becomes an escape. Your personal achievements are more than likely those of the group’s, not your own. The tasks are ever-changing; the challenges ever-progressing. The only limit to the work you could be doing is your imagination. And, in a place like the US, where overworking is normalized, rewarded, and tied to a nationalist mythology of rugged individualism, there are no external signposts to tell you how much is enough.

Why am I harping on work when your question is about potential? Potential implies that you are not yet who you are supposed to be—to be a promising future is to be a rejected present. It’s a deal of the soul—a promise you’re supposed to keep if you want to reach salvation. Every achievement, each one more difficult than the last, lures you with this promise. Yet, perhaps every time you’ve kept your side of the bargain, it never quite feels like what you imagined.

As much as children need love and safety when they grow up, they also need structure: an easy way to know that if certain things are in place, then their needs will be taken care of. The structure also tells them where they belong in the world of their origin family. Without structure, you may have gotten used to making it up—parenting—yourself. With a lot of structure, you may have been very good at picking up on these outer expectations and delivering on them, maybe sometimes despite your own preferences and needs.

So, perhaps, a young version of you looked within and without. Maybe you worked harder on the parts you could play in hopes it would bring love back to you. Maybe you wondered if your achievements could overshadow those things, conscious or not, you believed were wrong with you.

Yes, you’re having trouble with this current uncertainty, but it’s not about Fulbrights or MFAs. The stakes you’re feeling are old, and they have to do with love. Love that you’ve always wanted, that you’ve worked for and waited for, but for reasons out of your control, you have not been able to receive reliably. And this habit of looking to the next thing all the time, KZ, of wanting to live up to your potential, has nothing to do with who you want to be. It’s about grieving the love you were never supposed to work for. It’s about letting go of the love you are still waiting for.

What does it mean to be recognized, to be seen, by those you love? When we are children, the conditions and definitions of being seen are given to us by our caretakers. We try our best to grow within the terms handed down to us. It is, in many ways, about survival at any cost. Perhaps at this time, you learned to kick down an inconvenient you—the one who wanted love out of turn; the one who cried too much; the one who wanted to write poems all day instead of going to school.

You’ve worked to be someone else, all these years, because you felt you had no choice. To send out applications and to wait for judgment—it’s not unlike the ways we send out bids for love. Yet, no matter how much you climb each new milestone and unlock your “potential,” you’ll always be disappointed in how the future doesn’t hold the past. The love you wanted is not coming back. It may not have ever been there in the first place.

Because, KZ, no matter how practical you may feel yourself to be, it’s not the practical side of you who wants so much to achieve. It’s the inconvenient you, the one full of feelings and needs, who keeps on hoping they’ll be loved if only they waited a little longer, if only they did a little more. No matter how many times their love is not reciprocated, no matter how much time has passed, it’s the part of you who’s been most beaten back who believes that love can still be had.

That is, the recognition and love you’ve always wanted lives inside you, in a person who’s witnessed your pain, who can tell about it better than any other. Of course, this person is yourself, but they are the part of you who’s watched your long nights and weekends; who knows of the loneliness you dare not speak of; who openly holds each memory of love you are embarrassed to treasure—this part needs you too. It takes tremendous heart to hold this much love for so long and to not speak of it. Share a little in the burden. Give your heart room to break.