Other people’s timelines, first.
The particular exhaustion of measuring your life against the lives of people who went faster, who got the permanent position when you were still on the one-year contract, who owned the house when you were still renting, who had the children and the career and the marriage all apparently coordinated into a coherence that yours never quite achieved, the coherence that looks, from the outside of any life, like the obvious and achievable result of making better decisions than you made. I spent years in that comparison. I spent years finding myself behind in a race I had not consented to enter and could not locate the finish line of.
I stopped.
Not heroically. Exhaustedly. The comparison simply became too expensive to maintain. It required a constant inventory of other people’s visible lives against my own, a constant recalibration of where I stood in a ranking that kept changing its criteria, and I had neither the energy nor the interest anymore, and without the energy and the interest the comparison could not sustain itself, and so it quietly stopped, and what I found in the quiet was that I had not been behind at all. I had been on my own route. The route looked different from the expected route. It was still a route. It was going somewhere real.
My own expectations, second.
This one was harder. The external comparison was uncomfortable but the internal one was insidious, was inside the architecture of the day, was the voice that ran the assessment before I had gotten out of bed, that knew what I had planned to accomplish and was already noting the gap between the plan and the likely reality. I had extremely high expectations of myself and they were entirely self-generated and no institution or person had asked me to hold them and I held them anyway, with a rigour I would not have applied to anyone I loved, with a mercilessness that I called standards and was something closer to punishment.
I am revising the expectations.
To something kinder. To something that a person who loved me would set for me, which is still high, I have not become someone who does not care about quality, but high in the way a good teacher’s bar is high, which is reachable, which is set with belief in the student rather than anticipation of their failure. I am setting my expectations with belief in myself. That is new. That is, it turns out, the right thing to compete with. Not the timeline. Not the other people. Just my own best version, approached with warmth rather than a stopwatch.
