Confessions of an Underperforming Overachiever
A few weeks ago, we were sitting around the living room, when my daughter abruptly announced, apropos of God knows what, “Mom is the overachiever in the family.”
She listed off my accomplishments: namely starting a business and writing three novels. “And,” my husband added, if a bit sarcastically. “She is the only among us with an advanced degree.”
The label “overachiever” was, I believe, offered as a compliment. But when I hear the word “overachiever,” I can’t help but notice the prefix, over.
Let’s now re-diagram this sentence concentrating on that: “Mom is the one in our family who has achieved more than she really had to. In fact, might we not conclude that she’s both driven and perhaps a little shrill?”
There’s also the pathetic evidence that in, fifth grade, when we had the assignment of writing reports about the states, I turned in not one report, but two.
The world loves overachievers. There’s a saying in, well, everything: “You’re only as good as your last __________________.” In other words, let’s have some evidence that you’ve earned your stay on the planet recently.
I believe I’m an overachiever because, two and a half years into my existence, my parents produced a child with a penis, requiring me to significantly up my game.
Truth is, though, there isn’t even a Wikipedia page for me. And while I’ve consistently strained towards praise-worthy activities, there’s a big piece of me that always wants to stop and smell the roses. Or to change metaphors, part of me wants to press down the gas pedal, and another part of me wants to pull over ever few miles and check out an intriguing flea market.
So here I am in France, my final day at an artists colony, and (I’m afraid) all I have to show for it is bubkes.
If there’s anything I like better than overachieving, it’s finding a system that explains me. I’m a sucker for therapy, horoscopes, fortune cookies, online Tarot, Myers-Briggs and something called Enneagrams, a personality test that plots character types in a most satisfyingly geometric way. Today, I dropped $10 to take an online test to determine which Enneagram type fits me best. It came down to three: The Performer, the Epicure and thePerfectionist, with perfectionist a distant third.
I knew I would turn out to be The Performer (read: overachiever) but I could also recognize in myself the boredom-avoiding Epicure. Indeed, it’s the fact that I am both sides of this coin that has made an artist’s holiday in France so frustrating.
Every day, my fellow writers here have gotten up dutifully early, gone to their studios and worked all day. I’ve spent the first hour or so in bed, thinking about my dreams and scribbling them down in my journal. After finally rising, I’ve taken pictures, piddled around on Facebook, uploaded my pictures into photo albums, and then, shamefully late in the day, gotten around to writing.
At the same time, I’ve envied my husband, who didn’t come here under the pretense of Making Art, and has therefore had the pleasure of cycling the countryside, reading as much as he wants and baking. As far as I’m concerned, he has produced the only real work of art to come out of our stay in Auvillar: a batch of perfect gold croissants. Clearly he is the family Epicure.
A few years ago, I bought a poster of the Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover from 1971: I Do, I Have, I Am. I’m kind of embarrassed to say that it hangs in my bathroom, over the toilet, but that’s not a judgment on the art. It’s just where it looked best.
“I Do,” sunlike, shimmers at the top of the piece. “I Have,” a sad-looking clothesline, is an obvious indictment of acquisition. “I Am” is the winner. Solid, green, earthlike, “I Am” is clearly the foundation of everything.
Surprisingly often, I wonder whether it is better to be loved or to be a good writer.
This comes up when I think about my friend Sue, who both loves me andthinks I’m a good writer. She would probably argue otherwise, but I know that she thinks I’m a good writer because she loves me.
And isn’t that enough?
Isn’t that, in fact, better? Don’t I love my friends because of who they are, not what they do?
A few nights ago, several of us went out to the region’s best restaurant, and we giddily ordered an expensive meal, delighting in the amuse bouche and each other’s company. There was a warm glow over the whole evening, and I came home not just with my stomach full, but with my heart full too.
The next morning, still in the glow, sitting in the kitchen while my husband subordinated his croissants with an improvised rolling pin, one of my companions from the previous night came rushing in. She looked stricken, and indeed she had been. Overnight, she’d been notified that her father had had a stroke. She had to leave early.
All of us, who’d been at that dinner the night before, were out of sorts all day. We worked, but our concentration wavered. We couldn’t stop thinking of our friend, and we were all there to give hugs and wave goodbye when the taxi came to whisk her away.
And that’s when it occurred to me. That friendship — that incipient little snip of a relationship—felt more important than the short story I’d been struggling all week to write.
I do, I have, I am. But Steinberg had it right. It is in my being — not my doing, not my having, not even my writing — that I love and eat and gorge myself on all the amuse bouche, literal and figurative, the world offers up. It is in my being that life happens. It is in being where the heart resides.
I don’t know if that’s earned me my last week or so on the planet, but I think I just got away with it.
This story originally appeared in Midcentury Modern and was written at VCCA Le Mouline a Nef. Follow Debbie at her new blog and podcast Stuff Dot Life.