If you're not prepared for this one thing, career success will make you miserable
Was I prepared? LOL NO. Here's hoping you can learn in convenient newsletter form what I had to through agonizing trial and error.
A popular misconception about career success is that once you achieve it, people stop trying it with you. At least I hope this is a popular misconception: I’ve had it, and I do try to keep up with the trends.
When I worked for other people, I believed that whenever I eventually became a boss, I would feel like I had climbed a ladder out of a zombie horde. No more hands would wave in my face all day, grabbing for my time and attention. No more people I barely knew would ask me for help; at that point, I would be too high on my ladder to help them. Above all, no one would get upset with me if I let them down. They wouldn’t have any real expectations of me in the first place! They wouldn’t dare!
Some day, I believed, I would be able step off my success ladder altogether to walk life’s parapets unmolested, serene in my authority and unafraid to stumble every so often as I went. There’s nothing to fear in the occasional faceplant, after all, when you’re not surrounded by zombies threatening to eat you alive the moment you trip.
Only this is not how it worked. This is not how any success works. And if you’re harboring similar fantasies about what will happen after you become a famous, critically-acclaimed, prolific, published, award-winning, or whatever kind of writer, best to stomp them out now.
Over the years, I’ve watched a lot of people-pleasing author types fall into the same trap I did: working and working toward a career pinnacle on the mistaken assumption that at some point, success will enable them to cash out of emotional pain altogether. And I’ve sat with them through the grief of realizing that was a lie.
Perhaps they’re sensitive to criticism and believe that once they win that Booker, other people’s harsh words will never bother them again. Perhaps they think that if their advance or sales are high enough, their publisher will surround them with an entourage of large men wearing earpieces, and these large men will bounce every bogus incoming request (“…no fee, but EXPOSURE!”).
This fantasy of Achievement = Psychic Immunity looks a little different for everyone who has it, but it is a very, very crowded genre. In our own ways—be we men, women, or nonbinary; marginalized or centered; privileged or disadvantaged—all of us here in the States have been brought up to believe that adult life works like some kind of 1980s Rodney Dangerfield zinger. Struggle, schlubbiness, overwhelm, mortification, loneliness, shame: these are the emotional provenance of people who don’t get no respect. And once one does get that respect, they’ll disappear.
Right?
Wrong.
To continue the zombie metaphor: what achieving success actually feels like is staying right at eye level with the zombie horde, only now you’re soaked in zombie pheromones and standing under a giant, flashing neon arrow pointing straight at your face. There is also a sign under the arrow that says CLEVER ZOMBIES EAT FREE. The branding kind of looks like In-N-Out Burger, but instead of burgers, the food on the menu is you.
If fielding other people’s requests, needs, anxieties, projections, insults, hurt feelings, anger, complaints, rejection, and cruelty bothered you before you achieved public-facing success, it’s all going to get exponentially worse for you afterward. EXPONENTIALLY.
It’s partly a numbers thing: the more successful you are, the more people know you exist, and the more people know you exist, the more of them will send you correspondence.
It’s also partially a function of personality types. In my youth, I made a mistake in assuming everyone on Earth was exactly my brand of dysfunctional: they struggled with insecure feelings; they did so in part by assuming no one “important” had time for them; and because this made sense—why would important people have time for them?—they never really felt the need to protest.
False. False false false false. FALSE.
First of all: there are plenty of non-dysfunctional people out there who engage in none of this ridiculous and inaccurate population-level thinking about human behavior, and we love them.
Second: among the insecure, there are many people who self-soothe through a fantasy of entitlement to the time and attention of high-achieving individuals. When they feel ignored by those individuals, and they usually end up doing so, people like this generally do not react well.
There is also a sizable population of people who would say they don’t feel entitled to the time and attention of people they admire, but if those people make them feel neglected or rejected, they still have an intense fight-or-flight reaction. Which might spur them to lash out. Or dump the offending party and run away.
Add all of this together, and you have this incontrovertible fact: career success does not remove trauma triggers from one’s inbox or nervous system. On the contrary, it multiplies them.
Dramatically.
Please, please, for the love of God, prepare for this—ideally before you publish that book, get that promotion, start that successful company, etc. Prepare for it so you do not have to deal with the mental health fallout of being unprepared.
You can grow to a point where anxious, angry, or otherwise needy people bother you less. You just have to do it by working intensely on your emotional maturity and boundaries vs. trying to escape the hard emotional work by climbing up some achievement ladder.
This kind of growth is hard; it takes many years; it’s never fully over. But come ON — it’s no harder than the insane escape artistry you’ve been undertaking in order to avoid it all this time. Finding a fantastic therapist, diving into the literature on family systems and emotional maturity, feeling occasional mortification: none of this is harder than writing and publishing an entire freaking book or working 100 hours per week or whatever it is you were doing before in your fruitless attempt to escape the prison of your own mind.
Yes, many more bees do start buzzing around your head when you’re a success, but even if they’re stinging you senseless, they’re not really why you’re getting hurt. Bees gonna buzz, and if they feel threatened, they’re going to sting.
Your problem is you. You are doing one or more of the following, to your own detriment:
heading into Bee Town with inadequate PPE;
sticking around in Bee Town unnecessarily, when all you have to do to stop getting stung is remove yourself from Bee Town; or
signaling through some subconscious behavior that you are here in Bee Town to stomp on bees, and therefore any bee who wishes to defend her queen must attack, attack, attack.
I can’t tell you which it is. Only you can—well, that or a therapist or emotionally mature, close friend who loves you unconditionally.
You are never going to be able to escape emotional pain altogether. Not through therapy, not through self-care, not through addiction or distraction, not by publishing a book, not by winning a Nobel prize, not by finding true love. Not through anything. At least not while you’re alive. Sorry.
What you can do is stretch, lift, practice, and dance with your pain, day in, day out, until it’s warmed up and limber and toned and frankly no longer all that painful. You can learn how to say “no” and/or back out of commitments consciously instead of flaking or floundering in overwhelm and resentment. You can learn to bring your executive function back online when panic shuts it down.
You can even learn how to field criticism and rejection and acknowledge your own mistakes without wanting to die for days afterward. Yes, even THAT kind of mistake—the one that’s enormous and/or triggers you particularly hard. You’re a human being. Human beings make those. Even the most brilliant and talented ones. It’s OK.
As you work toward the goal of publishing a book, achieving fame and regard, becoming CEO, becoming an authority, or whatever it is you want to do, please do not neglect your emotional growth and maturity. Doing so is like trying to climb Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen, and as any of the erstwhile cracked.com readers in the chat can tell you, people who try to do that generally end up frozen solid near the summit.
What’s the saying? “After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”
This was really helpful!! The bee analogy is on point, too.