Can I witness who I am—here and now—and allow this version of me to be enough, while working to continually learn and grow?
It’s an interesting season of life, this one. And often, I ask myself this question. Some days, I can bear myself with grace. Other days, I crucify myself for not being good enough, wondering if I should pull the pin and get back to something I’m better at. How I live out this question, in this season, will determine if I can the avoid the familiar trap of being “good at everything” for the rest of my life.
I’m old enough to have tasted success; I’ve chased down the big achievement, and I’ve taken pride in the press clippings about nailing such an achievement. In that taste of success, I became addicted to the dopamine hit of praise, even building a life where those hits sustained my reason for waking up. (Undergraduate and graduate education is the land of perpetual dopamine hits.) And I’m old enough now to have felt the withdraw of those hits. Call me lucky, call me unlucky, call it whatever, it’s just what my life experience has been. I want no pity, and I am grateful for the experiences I’ve had, but because of the path I’ve chosen now—one where I spend my days doing something other than what I mastered in the previous eight years—I am a long way from those highs of success, if I ever taste them again.
In our last semester of medical school, my class joined a softball league. There we were, a bunch of nerds, playing against Busch Light-pounding and parking lot-brawling softball lifers. For the first half of the season, we got our ass kicked. A few classmates on our team had never caught a ball—no lie—and it showed. At our incompetence, the lifers had their way, run ruling us unless they purposely hit the ball at our better players to make the games go on for longer. I, having played baseball growing up, was one of our better players. And every game, I gave it all I had. Once, I pulled my quad trying to catch a fly ball hit to one of our players who had never caught a ball, running far from my own position. Fiercely, I wanted to beat the lifers. To show them who we were. To show them who I was.
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Though, as the second half of the season turned, we started to get better. In the last of games, we beat the best team in the league. One of our players, that had never seen a softball just a month prior, recorded the last out of the game by catching a sky-high fly ball. In my life, it was the first miracle I had witnessed. And as we celebrated in the infield, drinking our own Busch lights and laughing at how incensed the lifers were at losing to the nerds, one of my classmates turned to me and said, “Ryan, are you good at everything you do?”
At first blush, I embraced the compliment, thinking, “Yeah, I am good at everything. Go me.” But when I was back in my car, swoon of victory fading, I saw one of those rare, honest pictures of my life and where being “good at everything” had got me. It got me to medical school. It got me to the top of my class. It got me into residency. Now, I was receiving compliments and attention from my classmates about how I played softball. But I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t doing meaningful work. I was doing fearful work, aimed at preserving impressions, and I was about to start a four-year residency in something I didn’t want to do. I was moving to California, away from my family and friends.
How well was being “good at everything” working for me?
Now, I write and restore furniture. In both, I am a novice. And every day, I look up the difference between who and whom or walnut and oak. I am not good at these things. I am trying to get better, but I am not good, nowhere near the perfection I once held as the measure of any activity’s worth.
But for the first time in a very long time, I am where I want to be. I am okay with this version of myself, most days. I really want to be okay with this version of me because it’s who I am, not the guy trying to be “good at everything” he does.
If I can learn to live in my imperfections, how many moments along the journey can I cherish, not burdened by the absence of some future, perfect version of myself that I have not yet attained, if ever attainable?
A lot, I hope.
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