Wondering Whether Success is Meant for Me
We talk a lot about representation. How essential it is to see people that look like us, share our experiences.
A white, young, middle-class, cishet, able-bodied, neurotypical woman from the New York Metropolitan area, I ostensibly have no shortage of representation across all and media and all professions. And yet, I still somehow never really feel like I hear a voice that sounds like mine.
We are inundated with voices from the other side of the success narrative. Curated, broadcast, by politics, social media, the news, and history — people who’ve made it, with the bias of achievement on their side, telling their stories.
I would tell mine, but I don’t know what it is. All I have are questions and wishes. Fierce, hungry wants and staggering uncertainties.
I’ve never been satisfied. White hot lust pulses inside me for more. My belly knows life will bring something warmer, fuller, realer, richer, juicier, deeper.
But I don’t know the path to more. Meandering in grey, mundane space, I feel around half-blind for the right move, tiny and eclipsed by infinite potential failures. I can’t tell if I’m settling for mediocrity or wisely trusting the timing of the universe. I don’t even know which star I’d reach for if I were to try.
Every action has millions of contradictions wrapped up in it. Opposing forces that achieve some type of mysterious balance or harmony. How can we not have more questions than answers? How can we not be talking more about how wild it is to have a body, to be here?
I remember being a kid, writing for hours in my journal and brimming with self-assurance. I’d have thought I’d have achieved more by now.
But the self-awareness that growing up brought has inhibited me. For years, I floated in wispy uncertainty in a mysterious space far outside my own gravitational field. I was an atom and other people’s opinions were planets. I don’t understand why life would let us get lost for so long.
When I don’t know who I am, I am a vacuum of pure sadness hoping to draw in something beautiful. I turn inward to grasp myself. At times I’ve been bullied and rejected for this, impressing a feeling in my stomach that there was something fundamentally wrong with me that *those* people could see.
I don’t think there was something wrong with me. I think I was just afraid and learning. But I wish more voices that spoke to that pure, unsure place inside. Voices not like arrows soaring through air, or fists coming down on a table — but like feathers blowing in the wind or stars flickering in the corner of your eye that disappear when you look straight at them or flames that can dwindle or roar depending on the direction of wind.
I’ve been told I have the most extroverted planets — Mars, Venus, Jupiter — in the sunny, heart-filled, glowy, showy sign of Leo, but in my twelfth house of privacy and the subconscious, so there’s this push and pull between hiding and being seen. This feels as good an explanation as any for my ambivalence. Or maybe it’s just part of being human that we don’t put words to.
For whatever reason, the dance between chasing spotlight and shrinking away from it absorbs me. I ache for the light’s warmth; I am raw and overexposed from its intensity. I tiptoe on the shadowline, walking the tightrope of visibility, trying to thread the perfect needle between being open enough to thrive but not so open that I feel ashamed. I don’t know whether I need to reach out and bloom or burrow in and root. So I wait — resenting my inertia and curled up in its protective force. Wondering whether success and safety, being heard and feeling home, will ever — can ever — reside in the same place.
