(aka: The Anxieties of Over-Achieving and Always Being the Good Guy)
Are you the hero riding in to save the day or the villain wreaking havoc on the world around you? Do you see yourself as the angel taking care of those around you or the devil running around carefree focused soley on yourself? Are you the saint loved by all that know you or the sinner out for only fun?
In movies and books it’s all clearly defined. The “good guys” versus the “bad guys”. A world in which good stands in the sunlight dressed in white while bad lurks in the shadows dressed in black. A realm where good does no wrong while bad does no good. Everyone fits into a box and no one colors outside the lines.
On the surface, we route for good. We think of ourselves as being on the side of good. Always striving to be good. And stay good.
But that’s a lot of pressure. Good sets the bar high. And good is consistent. So there is a constant pressure to work hard at everything you do to maintain meeting that standard you have set for yourself.
But each time you put in a high level of effort to reach that goal, achieving it never quite feels like a win. It can merely feel like you managed to stay consistent. Where you were expected to be.
It’s a heck of a lot of self-expectation, planning, multi-tasking, and accomplishment to stay where everyone just expects you to be anyway.
Ironically, when you are all-good, it really only gets noticed if you fall short. And once you fail to consistently meet the expectation of perfect goodness, you worry that it’s all over now. You will no longer be seen as all-good.
And in an all-or-nothing mindset, that means you have failed. Do not pass go. You are out of the game. Move aside to let the other players continue playing.
Whose mindset that actually is doesn’t matter as much as whose you perceive it to be. Maybe it’s the mindset of society, coworkers, friends, neighbors, family, parents, or kids. Or maybe, it’s only your own mindset that worries others might see you that way. Either way, if it exists in your own thought process, it feels real in your experience.
Everyone who knows you has always thought of you as a saint. Nice, caring, compassionate, understanding, patient, tolerant, motivated, enthusiastic, successful, fun…. In every situation, to every person, at all times. Just writing the list is exhausting, let alone living it.
Everyday saints are loved, yes. But it’s exhausting living up to that expectation. Be it your own of that of those around you. It’s draining to feel like you need to be all things good, to all people, all of the time.
Sinners, on the other hand, have it easy. They have set the bar low. In living only for themselves, without concern for consequence or future, no one has expectations of them.
They put no pressure on themselves. And since those around them realize this, it becomes easier for those people to just work around them with everyone else pitching in extra. They have learned over time this is more efficient than running in circles trying to nurture behavior from the sinner since the only behavior we can really control is our own.
Now a sinner will not appreciate this because, by definition, they are only aware of themselves. They are not necessarily acting, or purposefully not acting, out of malice, but rather existing in oblivion of the effect they have on those around them.
Interestingly, the sinner exists largely under the radar until one of those random moments when normal life expectation happens to intersect momentarily with something they stumble into doing.
To the untrained eye this appears as an achievement. Because the bar has been set so low, even though this achievement would have never even been flagged on the radar of a saint, the sinner is celebrated. Those around them rejoice in the effort put forth in this momentous occasion and reward the behavior with praise and adulation.
In the scorebook of life, the events that stand out when one thinks of the saint and the sinner are quite different.
When looking across the sinner’s life, what stands out to people is the few times they actually did something considered “good”. This gives the viewer the perception of goodness achieved, and leaves them with a positive perspective of that person’s actual potential.
When looking across the saint’s life, what stands out to people is the few times they fell short of “good”. This may give the viewer the perception of their failure to stay good, and may leave them with a more negative perspective of that person’s actual shortcomings.
In the grand scheme of things, there is an omnipotent viewpoint. From this higher view
, it’s known that to be human is a verb as well as a noun. It is the action of continual thoughts, decisions, and actions, as well as the progression of change over the course of years we refer to as living.
That all-knowing vantage point realizes that to be human is to be imperfect, and to live is to find the way to pull yourself up again each time you inevitably stumble.
Unfortunately we often aren’t able to rise to that viewpoint, and instead, see ourselves as having failed at times, when all we were truly doing is being human.
Maybe to achieve peace of mind within a lifetime is to realize that we can only control how our own mind judges us, and that most of the time, we should be much more gentle on ourselves than we actually are. And that the life we live exists in the shades of gray between those extremes of black and white we tend to focus on.
If we can find a way to know what resonates within our own selves as “right” or “wrong”, “good” or “bad”, “positive” or “negative” in any given situation, and make each small decision based on what rings true within our own experience, then we should see ourselves as succeeding.
If we can find a way to realizing our own unique truth, standing strong and not allowing ourselves to be swayed from it, speaking it with kindness to those around us, and acting on it responsibly so as not to hamper anyone else’s truth, than we have found our best path in life.
A path where no one is all sinner, and no one is all saint. Where we can all accept ourselves as a little bit of everything, doing our best to color our lives outside of the lines.