Madi Crory's Definition of Success

Studies for weeks and maintains a spot on the principal’s list. Wakes up early--without complaint--to put on makeup and straighten her hair. Gets dressed in an outfit that was picked a night in advance. Puts her alarm away from her bed so she has to get up on time. Reads before she goes to sleep so her eyes are spared from the killer blue light. All statements I can rarely use to describe myself, but so wish that I could. These statements are usually said by the people I, as well as many others, would say are very successful; people I admire and use as role models. They shine through the hallway and everyone can almost feel just how put-together they are. This game of impersonation can be beneficial at the surface but is much more dangerous than it seems. You pass the next Elon Musk or Oprah Winfrey in the hallway and though they haven't touched you, you have been pummeled by your own inferiority. Unlike a game of cat and mouse, it's a game of cat and prettier cat, where no one seems to be getting hurt externally, but the uglier cat is internally burning in the fire of comparison and jealousy. It feels like you are constantly losing a wrestling match with a mannequin.

Everyday I am reminded of my personal shortcomings. Maybe it's forgetting a line at the play because I drifted off mid-rehearsal. Or maybe its standing next to my cousins - female and male - who have at least 3 or 4 inches on me (even a whole foot in some cases). Or maybe it’s learning that Pablo Picasso painted his famous Self-Portrait at the age of 15 while I, of the same age can barely draw a heart. Though I don’t expect myself to be a perfect, rich, intelligent goddess, it’s hard not to compare yourself to such when you are surrounded by people that you see as successful in the media and in real life. I am constantly in conversation with some of the fifteen-year-old Einsteins in my own grade and though they are some of the sweetest people I have ever met; the inevitable self loathing of my own intelligence begins to eat away at my self-esteem.

There is one person within my grade who I highly praise as being the paragon of success. Her life reminds me of an ikea catalog, where everything is organized and each piece of the room as a whole is thorough and pristine. She has a bullet journal full of perfect scheduling and clean handwriting, grades higher than Shaquille O’Neal, and multiple community service hours up her sleeve. I mean she started her own school club for Christ’s sake. How do you even compete? She appears to be the Ferrero Rocher amongst Hershey kisses, but when asking her about her insecurities, she had a definite list. She bites her nails, she is overemotional, she is highly anxious, and wishes she was better at art. How is it that a person who is objectively successful can feel so inferior? Think poorly of themselves? Ignore their own success?

We students never let us consider ourselves successful, even the students who are sustaining above 4.0 GPA’s. For one, it makes you question your own vanity, but the even larger reason is because students need an end goal to work to. For people like the student described above, success can never be fully achieved because not having anything to improve upon, or having no clear goals is much harder for the brain to bear. What I have come no notice is that when the brain has achieved success, in happiness, grades, or even wealth on some occasions, it hardly even notices how much it has done. It just sort-of ends up there.

The days where I end up most successful are the days I’m not constantly thinking about it. Not working to be successful or more successful than others, working to get what I want done and completing it. To put it bluntly, success is blissful ignorance -- for me at least. When focussing on how close you are to your own personal definition of success, you usually find yourself to be unproductive or a failure. However, when work is done without those constant bombardments, you finish feeling success, even if you have not done you best. You are proud of your work alone, not how your work looks next to another person’s work. If you constantly forget about success, how can you ever feel unsuccessful? Success comes when my brain isn’t in constant comparative agony. When I am thinking for the present and nothing else. When my standards have subsided and my mind is left with only its own resources to use and is not searching for the abilities other’s possess. That is how to achieve real, raw success: the enchanting mental peace of not being aware.