Pressure - Solace Coaching Company

Last week, I gave you a guided reflection on writing goals for your life, and one of the things I hope you heard was the loving caution to not be too hard on yourself. The reflection for this week might show you why I know that to be so important.

Last Spring, my best friend looked at me while we were packing up my kitchen, after I had left my job, started my life coaching certification, bought a house out in the country, and was borderline frantically researching “when is the best time to have your kids transfer schools”. She paused in her packing to look at me and said, “I love how you just do all the things!.” I remember her compliment popping into the bubble of my consciousness even when my mind was full to bursting with things to do, with the refrain “Hurry-hurry-hurry” softly but urgently playing in the background. While I had a sense of consolation and purpose, I also vaguely remember noticing that I hadn’t showered in days, I hardly worked out anymore, and my house was in total disarray as I remade it for prospective buyers. It didn’t really feel like I was doing all the things, but I also registered feeling proud and little puffed up that I appeared that way, so accomplished and on top of things.

I took the compliment. I reveled, temporarily, in being what society wanted me to be.

I have always done all the things. As long as I can really remember, anyway. Since fourth grade, when we moved to Portland from Southern Oregon and my world got rocked. All of a sudden, things mattered that I had never thought of before. I had my first day of school in my new town at my new parochial school up in the West Hills (like the West Hills from the song, “I Will Buy You a New Life”, by Everclear). That first day, the other 9-year-old girls on the playground checked the tags on my clothes to see where I had bought them. They made fun of me when they saw they were from Target rather than from Gap, and I tried to lie and say that just the button was from Target, though I had never heard of either store before. As a perceptive and intelligent female oldest child, I knew pretty instantly that things had changed, and that there was a game I now needed to play. As a competitor, as soon as I realized I was in the middle of a game, even though I hadn’t chosen it, I decided to win.

My mom traces my borderline-toxic overinvolvement to that year. From fourth grade on, if there was a sport, I played it. If there was a club, I joined it. If there was an election, I ran in it. I had to be at every activity, every dance, every contest. Not only that, but I definitely internalized that if I wasn’t in the 99th percentile, I was worthless. I couldn’t just play the game, I had to win it. That was the way to prove my worth to those girls on the playground and to everyone who came after.

I never wanted to play this game. I wonder what would have happened if we would never have moved to the big city, if it’s something I wouldn’t have had to prove, or if it was something in me that was always going to rear its head. But it’s something that I have pursued–and excelled at– for three quarters of my life now. Those things are hard to unlearn. It’s part of the reason that we moved to this smaller town in Central Oregon: there’s a point at which the pressure to be AMAZING CRUSHES you.

Before we moved here, I was teaching and ministering at a School of Excellence. Literally, that is the accolade it earned in the 90s back when I was a student there: I went to a nationally-titled School of Excellence. And then I grew up and taught there. Though it’s changed a lot from the time I was a student, one thing that has stayed the same is that the students are molded to pursue excellence in all they do. I have very mixed feelings about this. While the pressure to succeed has helped me to excel in a lot of areas, it has also made it difficult to see that I am good enough.

That difficulty has made it so I resonate with certain things. When the song “Surface Pressure” came out in the movie Encanto, I sat on the couch with my husband while the kids were sprawled on the floor and I sobbed quietly into my wine glass with my hand hiding my face, until I finally looked up at my husband and said, “I know exactly what she’s singing about.” I understood what she meant when she sang,

“Who am I if I don’t have what it takes?

No cracks, no breaks

No mistakes, no pressure.

Under the surface

I’m pretty sure I’m worthless.”

I know how it feels to know that

“Under the surface

I hide my nerves, and it worsens”

And I also knew the intoxicating temptation to continue living with that pressure, because I know what it feels like to

“move mountains…move churches

And [to] glow, ’cause I know what my worth is”

This is why the pressure to be excellent is an addicting spiral: because we get praise every time we do something exceptional. And so we keep shouldering burdens much heavier than is healthy, because we are caught in the inTOXICating.

From my childhood, I started to feel and rise to the pressure of being top in everything, and that grew in me through high school, into college, and into adulthood. It has affected every part of my life, from my work to my motherhood to my friendships to my relationship with my husband and my relationship with my body. It is everywhere and I have lived my life always under the influence of it. As the line says:

“Watch as she buckles and bends but never breaks

No mistakes, just

PRESSURE”

The middle half of my life was trying to attend to the demands of this pressure: trying to do more, go harder, be better, be stronger, faster, leaner, prettier, more empathetic, more intelligent, the best at everything…or at least top 2%. I remember going to my OBGYN a few months after the birth of my first son, when I was not back to my pre-baby weight, and being unable to hear any of the good things he told me about how I was recovering because I wasn’t at my goal weight. I remember him saying to me at the end of the visit, a little exasperated, “You are still healthier than 99% of the people we see here.” And I remember walking out of there being so irritated by that statement: 99%?! Why wasn’t I healthier than 100% of those people?! Who was this last 1% I was competing with?!

Honestly, even now when I reread that and I know how unhealthy and toxic that is, I still sort of feel like I have to get after that and top them all.

I used to understand this as being “the best version of myself”. It has taken me a long time and some very hard work to understand that this kind of pressure is not a benevolent dictator of my life…or any of our lives. I am coming around to thinking it’s possible that “excellent” is not a good thing, that what the Bronte girls called “accomplished” is bullshit, that work-life balance and pursuing the hardest to be the best might not ever be a good thing. A few years ago, I had a nationally-ranked cross country runner in my class, and he shared with us that the cross country team has a tenet they try to live by: “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Seeking perfection, seeking the top spot, actually works AGAINST the good we are doing–and BEING–in our lives. What would happen if we let go of measuring ourselves against standards that are nearly impossible to attain?

My friend’s compliment to me, that I “do all the things,” prompted later reflection on my part. “Doing all the things” is an interesting phrase. An even more interesting compliment. A warning bell sounds softly in my head, or maybe my heart, as I hear it. I don’t know where these phrases come from-–they crop up in popular understanding and people look at you knowingly, smiling slightly with arcane wisdom when they say them to you. As my family and I continued on our adventure into the unknown, as we tore out our kitchen in the new house and found new sports leagues and drove to track meets all over Central Oregon and sold our old house and drove all our belongings over the mountains in a snowstorm, other friends started saying to me: ”Wow, Christina, I love how you do all the things.”

But then, I got sick, for almost three weeks, and my house became a messy disaster. The half-finished construction project is now insistent behind me and there is glue from art projects all over the floor and the kids have wrestling and gymnastics and rock climbing and I have to go to ANOTHER basketball tournament that will take all weekend. And I chewed out my kids in the car on the way to school today and was a terrible example of an angry driver, which I really don’t want to be. And I am so busy that I can’t keep up…yet I crave something more, deeper, what Ignatius would call the Magis, which is the deep richness of life. It is something that does not arise from pressure or overdoing or top 1%. I’m sensing, amid all the busyness, a loneliness starting to call to me, along with a deep desire to start living my gifts into the world in a new way, the picture of which I have only the faintest hint at this point. One thing I do know is that I want to live them without the oversight of pressure and excellence. As Luisa asks in the Encanto song, “Was Hercules ever like, Yo, I don’t wanna fight Cerberus?” For me, I don’t wanna do all these things and live in all this pressure, yet that scares me so much. I am scared to not live under pressure, because what if I let people down?

But I am noticing that I’m not the only one dipping her toe into this line of thought. I went to breakfast with a new friend last week, and she told me about the excellence of her past, of her competitiveness and successes, and a little of how that has translated into her adult life. And she said something that spoke to my soul: “I was so good at the game, that I never stopped to ask myself if it was a game I wanted to play.” The truth of her words has soaked into my bones, and I realize, no matter how much it scares me, I must stop and ask myself, “Is this a game I want to play?”

I know that I don’t want to play the game of doing all the things. I don’t think people can do that even if they want to. My husband and I made a deliberate decision to leave the city partly because we sensed increasingly that doing all the things was parasitic, slowly draining life from us, and borderline diseased. But it’s a hard thing to leave behind, because being known as someone who “does all the things” is being known as someone who is successful, who is celebrated, who excels at life.. Consciously walking away from that raises eyebrows, leads to conversations that trail off, and prompts kind smiles that feel sorry for you, because you are obviously just not cut out to be one of the shiny ones, the ones that do all the things and handle the pressure.

But as the song says, “Wait: If I could shake the crushing weight of expectation, would that free some room up for joy?”

In the early 1980s, Diane Keaton starred in a movie called Baby Boom, about an incredibly successful woman who is the absolute epitome of doing all the things and living up to the pressure. Not by her choice, she runs up against the decision of either doing all the things or doing fewer things deeper, with more intention, with more LOVE. She ultimately finds, through a difficult transition, that doing fewer things is richer, less controllable, more irritating at points, and that living her high-profile pressured life precludes the love which makes life really worth it. At the end of the film, when she is offered back her life of enviable worldly success, she chooses to walk away, saying, “I guess the rat race will have to survive with one less rat.” She walks toward a life filled with fewer accolades, less prestige, and more of what really matters. She will no longer be known as the woman who does all the things. But she will do the things that matter.

I can think of few more courageous things to do.

I think part of my lonely, slower feelings that show up as emotions I’d love to avoid, love to cover up with getting busier and more productive so that people will smile at me and marvel at how I handle the pressure, is simply what the transition to leaving behind the rat race feels like. It is scary for me. I know that I’ve kept it up for three decades because I can do MORE better than most people. I thrive on praise and impressing others, and that is such a dangerous detour from personal satisfaction with a life well lived, from listening to my deep inner self and responding to the nudges in my heart and soul. If I am to live more deeply, there is no way forward other than to weather this period of discomfort so I can see what’s on the other side, see what NOT doing all the things feels like, which I suspect is where my heart and soul really want to reside.

I suspect that becoming known as someone who does NOT do all the things will call on my deep courage. It will cost me the praise I have become used to, the crowd I have run with, some of the values I have espoused. It will take bravery and patience…but it will give me back purer love, things I actually care about, a more real sense of self, and an unplumbed peace in my soul. I feel the call to be more authentic, to stop being addicted to society’s applause, to leave the rat race and start pursuing the good rather than the excellent.

I have always told my students and my clients that there are some things that are the work of a lifetime, and that that’s why we are given a lifetime to work on them. I know this is one of mine. I know it’s not a simple wrap-up at the end of this reflection; I know that pressure will come knocking at my heart and my ego probably for the rest of my life, and I also know that I can redirect my incredible intensity toward CHOOSING the good rather than the elite. I am just setting up my writing desk at my new home, and the only thing I have on the wall so far is a poster that says, “They whispered to her: ‘You cannot withstand the storm.’ ‘I am the storm,’ she whispered back.” I can be the storm, the force, the strength, that chooses to calm down, to do less, to stand against the pressure. There are different ways to use strength, and I can practice reassigning mine.

Until the end of the film Encanto, only one character is NOT caught up in the pressure to do and be more: a little bird that takes off in a moment of fear and gets an insult hurled at him: “Quitter!” This is funny and an interesting juxtaposition to the theme of pushing through everything that fills up the rest of the movie. My husband Pat and I found this to be appropriate to our life and we now have a cheers-ing ritual based on Encanto: when things are feeling quite stressful, very pressured, too many things going on and they all have to BE AMAZING…well, we clink our glasses and he says, “To quitters!” and I respond, “To pressure!” It’s always going to be there: that pressure to do and be more. But maybe I can start quitting my habit of letting it rule my life. Maybe I can put on my Target pants and see what happens if I try to be good instead of excellent, if I try to do some small things with great love and if I let the voice of Truth, rather than the voice of praise, lead the way.

Reflection questions:

Have you ever felt pressured to do or be more? Have you felt the message that you are not enough? When you felt that message, what happened in your body? In your relationships, including with yourself? In your life?

Consider the way that you handle pressure or being overscheduled. How do you think that affects those around you, especially those you live with and spend a lot of time with? If you are a parent, what messages about pressure and overachieving are your children learning from you?

Do you like the pace you are running at in your life? Do you sense that you are setting the pace or that you are responding to the pace set by others? Would you like to make any adjustments, and what would that take?

Songs for Reflection:

I pray for you as you get into these questions in your life. Remember that some things are the work of a lifetime, and they are worth working on even though we all die still trying to get it right. God be with you, and may he grant you peace and love. Until next time.

Please get in touch with me if you would like a free coaching session, to see if we would be a good fit to work together as you get into the deep stuff in your life.

Solacecoachingcompany.com

@asrealaspossible

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