Stuck: Celebration While Struggling
Of all of the connection-oriented values that I’ve written, read and thought about over the past few years, celebration is the one that comes hardest to me. Sometimes I think I am just wired to always want more and that, combined with my keen eye for comparison, makes me an easy target for envy. Envy is a resentful longing for something someone else has, and it can’t coexist with celebration. In fact, I think celebration is the antidote to envy.
You can’t resent what someone else has when you’re calling out how hard they worked for it, or how much better the world is because they put their efforts into it. And the longing becomes less acute when I’m caught up in the joy of their success too. But it is a choice for me, and a hard one. I often find it hardest when I’m feeling the most stymied in my life – stuck in hard places, spinning my wheels on projects and trying to keep it all together.
Forrest and I chose to have kids relatively early and so we spend the last half of our 20s watching all of our friends go on incredible vacations, get amazing jobs, and having the time of their lives while we changed diaper after diaper after diaper. It was hard to celebrate for my friends. Having kids has been the great joy of my life but it’s not quite as fun as, say, ziplining in Costa Rica. I like to think I celebrated them well. I like to think I wanted good things for them. I like to think I’m not too smug when I joyfully announce I don’t do diapers anymore and I never have to again unless I want to.
But it wasn’t until I didn’t feel so stuck that celebration got a lot easier. As the kids aged, things eased up and celebration came easier. Until I started writing. And then I felt stuck there, spinning my wheels, trying to figure this whole thing out while still parenting and uh-oh, here comes summer break and there goes my writing time. Once again, envy creeped in. “Of course they can write three books a year, they probably have a full-time staff just letting them write all day long. And I bet they live in a really peaceful idyllic place where the dishwasher never breaks and the dogs are all well trained and unicorns bring them magical fairy dust every day.”
I can’t let my life circumstances determine whether or not I’m going to celebrate the people in my life. Envy destroys connection and I won’t let it undo the work I have done to build my community. I wish I could say I have an easy answer, but it all comes back to making sure I’m focusing on the right things. In this case, the small successes for myself and the big efforts by other people. I need to notice when I’m achieving small things – things like getting 100 words written when I didn’t want to write a single one.
I also need to acknowledge that not one person has a unicorn bringing them fairy dust. I’m not saying we all have it equally easy, but the people I envy? I should be admiring them. Every one of them has overcome hard things. Every one of them has pushed past those same feelings of stuck-ness I am. They’re providing a path for me to follow, if I choose to.
That’s what community is for – helping us to see the good even when our circumstances aren’t so convincing. Helping us to find the path back to wholeness when we feel scattered. Helping us to realize that no one earns anything just by themselves, we work together, supporting each other until the sum of our efforts is so much greater than its parts. And that’s worth celebrating
How has envy derailed your connections? How has celebration healed them?
