You Need to Stop Defining Yourself So Narrowly

Since high school, I’ve been a writer. I can even pinpoint the moment I started thinking of myself that way — I overheard a teacher compliment me while talking to another student. I realized she didn’t know I was listening, so she didn’t have to say it just to be nice, and suddenly, all my years of being awkward and feeling out of place shook away (at least for a split second). In that moment, I felt like I had figured out my thing — I was meant to be a writer! Somehow! And I’d find a way to get paid for it, surely!

Golly gee, I was naive. But enthusiastic. And while I’ve found a way to pay my bills while writing (and, admittedly, doing what I loved), I realized shortly after graduating college just what a curse it can be to define yourself too narrowly. When writing wasn’t working out — or any time I hit a rough patch, really, and my work wasn’t resonating with people or even being read — I felt like a failure. And a fraud. A failing, flailing fraud, who just sucked at life. Because I saw myself as just one thing, and if I didn’t hit the minimum expectations for being that one thing, then I wasn’t good enough. Cue the shame spiral.

It was in those moments of frustration, when I wasn’t writing but desperately wanted to be, that I forced myself to find distractions; other hobbies, like yoga and baking and paddle-boarding. Then those branched out into other things — things I couldn’t believe I was doing, like entering a 5K, when all my life I’d considered myself “not a runner.” (For the record, I still jog like a three-legged dog lumbering through quicksand, and every step of the way I feel like I’m dying, but I do it. And I’m starting to enjoy it.)

Most people would call this a social life. Throughout high school and college, I convinced myself working toward this main goal was my social life, because my friends were in the same field, grappling with that same fight for balance — and often rationalizing to ourselves that balance was for…mediocre people. A bit paradoxical, right?

In the process of branching out my interest, my definition of myself got a bit richer. I wasn’t just a “writer,” I was a tangled jumble of things, which meant that I could face a setback in one area — cough, writing, cough — without feeling like an amorphous blob of mediocrity. To be fair, there are still days when whatever catastrophe-of-the-moment has me reeling in a sea of “I suck, I suck, I suck,” but the waves are much milder these days.

All of this reminded me of a one-liner from my college newspaper adviser, who heard me obsess over the paper day in and day out, and finally sat me down to say: “Always have a Plan B.”

Granted, this was in the middle of the recession, when everyone in journalism was losing their jobs, and so he meant it pretty practically: Have a side hustle or other skill set you can lean on if you aren’t able to write.

That advice alone has resonated with me for years — it’s partially why Collegiate Cook exists — but on a deeper, semi-existential level that’d probably make my adviser roll his eyes, it’s also shaped who I am and how I view myself. If I lost my job, would that shatter my sense of who I was? Would it make me feel like I wasn’t good enough, because I’d take each rejection more personally than I should?

Yes and yes — and it wasn’t until I started stretching that definition of who I was that the little upsets of day-to-day life started feeling a little less personal, and a lot more, “well, let’s roll up our sleeves and deal with this.”

It turns out being a well-rounded person is way more valuable than a buzzword for college admissions applications. It can keep you sane.

 

This post is part of Life Between Weekends’ Tuesday Takeaway series. Every Tuesday, we’ll share the most compelling insight we’ve gleaned from a book, movie, tour, documentary or article to inspire you during the workday. 

Photo: Skyler Smith/Unsplash