Sometimes it’s the culture that is wrong, not you

One thing I’ve learned this past year through my travels is that sometimes being busy is a way of silencing personal issues you refuse to confront. When we continually applaud people who rise up the career ladder-we are saying that yes your identity and self worth is measured based on what you do for work. We barely make time for pleasure in our society as we work 40–60 hour weeks and we call that a success. Is it a success though to work long hours and have no time for your own hobbies, family, and cultivating an identity outside of your workplace? Is it a success though to barely stand on your feet at the end of a shift and yet the money you make still can’t pay all your bills?

Sacrificing ourselves, our sanity just to survive. And many of our leaders lead these comfortable lives and dont really give a shit about us, so we have to fend for ourselves in a culture we battle so hard for and the culture isn’t benefiting us..the culture doesn’t even love us

“What’s your purpose in life? Someday you will find it?” We go through our whole lives searching for some meaning and maybe the meaning is right in front of us-we don’t need contact lenses to see it. Sometimes the meaning is that there is no profound meaning. What a damper, right? Don’t take it literally. But, maybe my only purpose is everyday waking up and taking an amazing bike ride or talking with my friends..those are things i love. We put so much meaning behind what our purpose is supposed to be, we search our whole lives for it.

We ask children what they want to be when they grow up and yet as an adult we are still searching for what we want to be. We’ve been told we can’t accept ourselves until we become what we want to be and we don’t always even know what it is we want to be- talk about an existential crisis. When do we stop climbing and say okay this is where I wanted to be. Once one goal is completed, there must be another goal they say, perhaps we’ve been standing on the goal the whole time. Sure goals make life worth living, but so many of us derive our sense of self from it and what happens when we fail?

Standing on the finish line of one of my goals and thinking, “Okay I am here, now what? What happens next? I got what I wanted, so what happens next?” I go read killing commendatore by Haruki Murakami, that’s what happens next and what i’ve been doing this whole time anyways. I reached a goal and now I have to make another goal and I pause, and ask myself…”wait why do I need to make another goal? Am i not satisfied? I said i would be satisfied if i reached this goal?”

“You can’t contact me after 10 pm and not on the weekends if it’s work related” I told my coworkers and I remember the frustration as some eyes rolled to the back of their head. I spent the majority of my time biking or hiking, and constantly expressed my disapproval over long work meetings. Needless to say I wasn’t liked much or seen as hard working, because I refused to conform to the culture and challenged the status quo. I’m a teacher and I got into teaching, because I genuinely enjoyed it. The moment I started hating teaching was when I tried to conform to please my co-workers, the dismissive comments of my co-workers were disheartening. I’m human, so of course I wanted to be loved, however I wasn’t loving myself any more appealing to someone else’s standards. I tie this back into wanting to be loved by a culture that doesn’t even love us or accept us..a culture that asks us to conform. Yet why would we want to be loved by a culture that refuses to respect us unless we do what it is asking?

The story ended with my boss turning to me at a team dinner and saying, “I want you to have fun in the classroom, it’s not that serious. The kids are learning, so have fun and smile.” My boss became a metaphor for life. Life was saying, “hey girl you get one chance on this earth (that you will remember) be responsible, but have fun, you are going to die anyways.”

My coworkers were not wrong though, we all grew up living in a culture that defines our identity by our jobs. When we define our identity by our career, we aren’t giving ourselves a lot to fall back on. We can build a career and lose it in a day, look at the pandemic.

When I was young, I used to love racing with my cousins. I had my first ‘real’ race at 8 years old for the half mile at some army reserves function. Eventually in my teenage years I took up track and cross country in school, I loved it and until the pressure came time to win. When I had my mile down at 5:38, maybe my dad got a little too excited because I was grounded when I came in 2nd place one night when my mile went back up to 6 minutes and 30 seconds. A year later I quit track, it wasn’t fun anymore. I stopped running. My self worth crumbled and silently got lost in this identity that I couldn’t be loved unless I was someone or something…so I stayed in my shell because I didn’t want to be anything.

Our culture constantly reminds us that winners are to be loved..we applaud those who win, but we barely applaud those who try.

The majority of us stop doing things if we aren’t good at it, sometimes we don’t even start it if we aren’t going to be perfect.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to be real.

You don’t have to be perfect to be loved.

You don’t have to have the ideal career to be respected.

You don’t need to stay busy to prove something to someone.

You don’t even have to prove anything to yourself.

Sometimes it’s the culture that is wrong, not you.