Does achievement matter?

Yesterday a colleague asked me to send a professional bio so I wrote a quick list of all the newspaper editing jobs, the publications I’ve written for, the two books, the Ted talk etc. It felt weird to see this version of myself being put together on screen. This good on paper, impressive person. It didn’t feel connected to me at all.

‘Get you!’ she replied.

My reply: ‘Well, most recently I’ve been the editor of my bed.’

I’ve been officially diagnosed with long covid and have been unable to work the last few weeks. I cancelled a lot of the promo around Love Me!, my second book, and the time when I could have been doing my all singing-dancing-sharing of good reviews and articles around the book, I wasn’t able to. Or didn’t want to.

I spoke to a friend a couple of days ago about how weird it is to have not been in the world talking about the book and how I hoped people would find it anyway. He told me that no matter what happens it’s such an achievement.

I found myself saying ‘Achievement is bollocks.’

I don’t really know what I meant by that. I’ve lived much of my life trying to achieve things. I have put work above so much else - my health, my fun, my relationships - and while it has given me so much back, increasingly I think: what was that all for?

I keep thinking about this last book writing experience, how hard I pushed myself in the writing of it and how it might have made me ill.

There’s that phrase that Glennon Doyle likes to say: ‘We can do hard things.’

Every time I hear it I think: ‘Yeah, but should we?’ Life can throw enough hard things without us going out and creating hard things for ourselves in the form of books and marathons and whatever else we think we need to do.

Can’t we just let life be easy? Or easier?

We are so drenched in productivity messages - do more, buy more. We say ‘aren’t they amazing?’ when someone has done something that society says is good - like be on television, or write a book. But I really don’t think these are the important things. I think we’ve been told they are important and they are not.

I have friends who are, on paper, extraordinarily successful. They have done so much - and yet, as their friend, I look at them and think, darlings, I wish you’d do less. I wish you’d rest and realise you don’t to do that thing to prove to yourself that you matter.

Obviously, I am talking to myself too.

My algorithm is giving me a lot of Gabor Mate at the moment. He talks about chronic illness and how it can be linked to over-achieving and people pleasing.

I listened to a clip of him talking about his workaholism: ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. When you are driven to work too hard you actually ignore what matters… people sacrifice their playfulness and their joyfulness with their unconscious needs to validate their existence.. that comes from childhood trauma.’

I wonder how much achievement comes from an unconscious need to validate our own existence… and is, in fact, a trauma response.

Looking at it that way the most inspiring bio could read ‘do enough work to pay the bills, love my friends and family, having a nice life.’

Maybe I should put ‘editor at large - my bed,’ on my LinkedIn.

It might be my greatest achievement.

xx

PS - thank you thank you thank you to everyone who has read Love Me! and taken the time to get in touch. I so so so appreciate it. I will be writing more about the themes in the book over the coming weeks and also I hope to be able to reschedule book events when I’m better. I seem to be pretty good this week so fingers crossed I keep building on that. Love to you all xx