Are we dressing anxiety up as ambition?
On a need for speed: doing things once the right way, rushing, white-knuckling and cranking through life.
This all started out as a conversation I had on the phone with my therapist early one morning. I was sitting on an Adirondack chair on our balcony, the one I’ve dragged to face the thin strip of ocean we can see from our deck. I was telling her— Sarah, her name is Sarah— about my tendency to get irritable and impatient while doing an evening crossword with my fiancé. He gets frustrated with how snippy I get if I feel he’s not taking my suggestions fast enough.
She asked me if I felt frustrated when I was doing the crossword alone. I replied that I have never actually done a crossword alone, but I do get frustrated when doing puzzles or trying to build a piece of IKEA furniture, whether or not someone else is there. My frustration with things not happening fast enough has nothing to do with my fiancé, we deduced. I want things to move fast at all times, regardless of the thing, and regardless of who is doing said thing.
The puzzle pieces (pun intended) sort of started to come together then. I remember my boss telling my when I was 23 that my “constant misplaced sense of urgency” was actually anxiety.
I didn’t really like the idea of being perceived as anxious at work, but it’s easy to dress up anxiety as ambition... so which is which? And where’s the line?
My anxiety has worn an elaborate costume and masqueraded as ambition for over a decade. It started so simply, as things often do— I had transferred high schools my sophomore year, and clung tightly to one friend in a scary new school system full of boys and teachers who didn’t really care if you missed class and a bunch of other things that were really foreign to me, coming from a tiny all girl’s school.
My best friend’s family decided to move to Paris before our senior year. She decided she’d rather graduate early than try a full year of school in Paris (Parisian teens seemed scary, even then!) and set about doing so the second semester of our junior year. The idea of going through one full year of high school— and I hated high school— without her? Unfathomable. I’d graduate early too, I told my parents. My mom did it, there was already some basic comfort with the whole concept.
I don’t talk about this publicly very often, but I didn’t graduate early. I actually just didn’t finish high school… I took a standardized test a year or two later and essentially got my GED. Yup, high school dropout.
Why didn’t my plan to fast forward an entire year of adolescence not work? And how the hell did I get from high school dropout to whatever this life is now?