I really start preaching this reading. If you don’t listen to the podcast… ??? idk man. miss out if you want to. or, if you wanna get your life, download this shit. Or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
An essay formerly entitled: Pleasure in the Pursuit (I kinda wanna f*ck Excellence Pt. II)
Hello. It is a Saturday in October and I am drinking a hefty amount of chamomile-based teas. I write to you all, my Internet Friends, to both expand on and settle deeper some ideas about Excellence, and what Excellence might mean to us in a society that has hijacked our human relationship to work. I’ve been dwelling lately on themes surrounding work, pleasure, and my own relationship with the pursuit of Excellence as I re-evaluate my own relationship to work. There are two comments I received that really made me want to delve deeper into the concepts of Excellence and Enough. I don’t think I stressed how much they coexist quite happily in my life, so indulge me for a moment as we step back into my internal Garden Space, where I house all my human connection (including my human relationship with metaphysical concepts).
The first comment came from an Internet Friend called Nicolette. Love that name. They left a really reflective and insightful comment under the first essay that talks about the shame that can come with knowing your own bar for excellence is too high for you at the moment. I have felt a LOT of intense shame around this too, and the ready-made answer a lot of loved ones will give you is “don’t be so hard on yourself!” Or “just be patient!” Nicolette notes they are still dealing with shame even though they *know* they have to be patient with themself; that’s not an easy switch to flip. In this moment of reflection, they asked me, “How do you develop Patience with yourself when all you have known is Shame?
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The second comes from an internet friend on TikTok that commented on one of my videos about how exhausting intentionally staying in mediocrity is if you want to be Excellent. The video is linked here. They said the following:
“I honestly don’t like this because my idea of great doesn’t align with capitalisms idea and capitalism’s idea is not possible with my ADHD. And any amount of “hard work” is not going to get me to that. I understand that I have to define success on my own terms, but I don’t live in a bubble and there will always be a trace of that in my definition. I can’t be expected to break free in my thinking of the institution that I am forced to act under, so I think what I should do is be okay with my ‘mediocrity’ as defined by these institutions while working to dismantle them. Because I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been told how smart I am. Or how sad it is that I just don’t work hard enough to do well in a school simply not designed to cater to or accommodate my brain. I really like you as a creator and I’d love to see you expand on this.”
Here I am expanding. First, I want to be forthcoming about my own neurodivergence: I have ADHD and autism. I started therapy because I was low-key mandated by my undergrad academic counselors and was originally being seen for manic depressive episodes. I also did not grow up with wealth and that’s something that is assumed of me a lot on the internet, which baffles me a little bit. I am deeply familiar with the neurodivergence + capitalism one-two combo walloping you right in the hopes and dreams. I am also familiar with the constant heartbreak of adults saying they “wished I was better at follow-through” so I could “really make something of myself.” That’s not at all what I’m attempting to say, so I’d like to get in the nitty gritty.
I want to create some space for vulnerability as I share more about my circumstance, my community, and my internal relationships to work. This is extra vulnerable for me because you, listener, and I have a relationship because of my affinity for Excellence and my familiarity with Enough. I am talking to you about the work that I do that directly involves you. It’s a little meta and itchy for me, so I ask outright for your kindest possible listening ears.
To address these comments, I need to be very transparent. I realize that I am speaking with two certainties that I cannot expect of my audience:
(1) I have very clear ideas about what Excellence and success looks like for me outside of the drive of capitalism.
(2) I am very familiar with where I need to be Excellent and where I need to be Enough.
I would like to remind everyone of the conclusions of the last essay on Excellence, that my own personal definition of Excellence is when I impress myself. But before we even begin discussion, I need to expand a little bit on the role of capitalism here. Point One comes from a place of relative financial stability, not just in my personal finances, but in my community support. Even when my finances are not stable, I am not in crisis about it. I don’t really get sent into fight or flight mode when it comes to being broke, because I have been flirting with poverty my whole life and quite honestly it doesn’t scare me. BUT ALSO THE REASON BEING BROKE DOESN’T SCARE ME is I have enough community around me where I know that I can ask for help and be well received. This is immediately obvious in recent crowd-sourcing efforts, where I raised far more than I needed, but even in ways that the internet does not see. I have family and friends that are tight-knit and show up for each other. I have been sleeping on the couches of my friends for literally the entire month of September. I have the space to postulate about what success means to me outside of capitalism because I am not at risk of homelessness even if I don’t make a lot of money, and because I have no dependents, and because I am familiar with taking care of myself in financial strife, and because I have the access that comes with elite education. I am not in a place of desperately struggling to survive, and while I don’t have every social safety net I would like, I do have many more than others. HUGE and necessary context of my life.
Here’s what I would like to get into today: the balance of work. Not quite a “work-life” balance, but the work that I have to do being in balance. There are two kinds of work that exist in my life:
COMPULSORY WORK vs. COMPETITIVE WORK
Compulsory work is the work of capitalism, and it (unfortunately) must be done. It doesn’t matter how anti-capitalistic I am— I do not have a desire to starve. And we currently live under a system that will starve you if you do not or cannot produce profitable labor. The reason I am an anti-capitalist in the first place is because I think this is a fucked up way to navigate humanity, but nevertheless that is the case, right? I do not wish to starve and so this is work that I have to do. Compulsory work that can come with promotions or accolades or other kinds of fiscal and professional success, and it quite frankly is not that fulfilling for me. I got them all and it sucked, and I’m happy to have learned that lesson while still in my early twenties.
For me, compulsory work has no weight in my conversations about Excellence because I am not in a consensual relationship with this work. I have to do it. If it’s gonna be mandatory, whatever I can do to make this work as kind and as tolerable to myself as possible is… whatever I have to do. Aaaand that’s sincerely as hard as I think about it. I give compulsory work enough of myself to make me safe and stable. I do enough mandatory money work to be an asset to my future self and my community. I do my best to make my compulsory work things that are helpful and life-giving and community-oriented. When I am unable to perform in this area (because compulsory work is rarely kind and it is oftentimes has inadequate return), I am able to lean into my community for support. Excellence in compulsory work is a happy byproduct; it is never the point.
I want to say here to the comment from TikTok: I think it is imperative that you do have spaces where you can exercise work without the thought of capitalism. I do not believe there is no way to free my mind from the pressures of economic pursuit; in fact, I would argue that it is an absolute necessity that you do have mental, emotional, spiritual and WORK spaces away from that. Where is the that work you do that has nothing to do with pre-made, freeze dried, mass produced ideas of success? You have to make yourself space away from that pressure— otherwise where will you find the strength to world build? Yes, you can tear down with a mind still completely addled by the smog of the systems, but where is your space to imagine what you would like to take its place? How do you know what you’re ushering in if you don’t have any free space to dream?
Enter: Competitive work. The work I am doing for the sake of being better. This is my true arena. This is where I pursue Excellence to my highest ability. In the previous essay, I mention my “High Enough Bar,” where I imagine the work that I do as me competing in the high jump apparatus. I see me reaching for Excellence with my whole body in the sky, running and flying, running and failing, afraid of landing wrong, terrified of paralysis, yet constantly raising my own bar. This work is competitive because I am competing against myself (and myself only). This work is competitive because I am the sole judge of whether my performance is good not great, whether it’s better than yesterday, whether I am pleased.
This work is competitive for me also because I have no imposter syndrome with my art forms at the moment. I am comfortable. I am assured of my own ability to perform. Even my autopilot is pretty damn great. Competitive work for me comes in my art. It comes in my writing. These are areas of work that I am deeply familiar with my own capacity. I am not guessing or second guessing myself anymore; I know I am good. I’m damn good. I am currently in a disposition where I am rested, trained, and ready to compete.
I do not jump for my High Enough Bar if I am not trained and positioned to compete. Otherwise I will fail and I will hurt myself.
So here is our point about patience: how do you find it within yourself to be patient, even with shame?
I feel the shame anyhow. I’m not actually convinced that shame and patience negate each other. Most of my emotions have space to be in flux and coexist. I do not let shame compel me to competing to prove something to myself— that is setting myself up for failure and I avoid at all costs. I do not ask myself to perform hail Mary’s or Herculean feats when I know there’s a decent chance I will not clear that bar. I require deep trust in the way I push myself, in my own risk assessment, my standards. That sort of clarity only came from sitting my ass down in my spaces of Enough for literal years until I was cleared to play again. It was fucking frustrating. I am actually still regularly in spaces of making just enough, and it’s still fucking frustrating. However. It’s better than not listening to and trusting my body when my body said they were too tired to jump. Being frustrated by the process of submitting to my own exhaustion is better than believing that I was lazy or broken or undeserving.
Huge note here for traumatic events: Covid and its various complications beat my ass. I have lost so much of myself to grief; my capacity pre-pandemic might never come back. I will not pretend it was a cute process lowering my own standards to fit the person I now am. It was ugly. I also don’t want to posit the ugly parts of self-assessment and adjustment as bad. Ugly or undesirable isn’t bad. Shame isn’t something I need to flee from.
Additionally, I don’t want to posit Excellence and Enough as states that cannot co-exist. There are elements of my work that I feel okay to compete on, like writing. Podcasting is still something I am learning and getting the hang of, so right now is not a good place for me to begin to impose all these standards and expectations of myself. Painting is something I am making a return to after years of not picking up a brush— now is not the time to be thinking about whether it is Excellent or not. When you are learning how to do the high jump in the first place, you practice with a plastic pole, not a metal one! Why would you risk paralysis as a beginner?
Transitioning from Enough to Excellence and back again is a constant crescendo and decrescendo. It is literally the process of healing my internal relationship with work, which has been so hijacked by capitalism there was a point in time where I thought every kind of work was not worth the toll. Healing is rarely linear and does not often come with a final destination— even healing your relationship with yourself. There are seasons for full out competition and there are seasons where I do not leave bed for a week or… three. I trust myself to know and honor the difference instead of disrespecting my body, who is the one feeling all my emotions for me, and saying “you just need to get up.” That’s the fastest way to get me to ready to fight myself because who the fuck are you talking to? Why would I be so mean to me?
I know when I need the freedom to try and fail and to not have standards at all. We talked last time about the space of Enough being for healing, being a space to get to know myself as a friend again. That space never goes away. The only time I feel resentment for myself is when I know I am ready to compete, but I stay on the ground nursing wounds that are healed. It would be like having a fully healed leg but still not taking off the cast— eventually, your skin needs to breathe! Wanting to try and never trying has the same result of trying and failing: my ass is on the ground instead of up there, flying.
There are also spaces I simply don’t compete anymore, where I used to. Not even because I don’t want to, but because I can’t. The person I was when I was able to do those things is not around anymore. There is a lot of grief and shame in that for me and I don’t want to pretend like I don’t see those parts of myself and my performance.
I do still feel shame when I miss my own benchmarks, especially in knowing what it feels like to impress myself. Shame in my performance doesn’t negate my pride. I don’t run from the feelings of shame or disappointment because running will not do anything but create a feedback loop. Now, not only am I ashamed of falling short, I’m also ashamed of the fact that I feel shame in the first place— that I should “know better” or make better decisions in regards to my emotions.
I am not above or too evolved for any emotion, including shame. I will feel shame and still choose to take pride in myself.
I think this is why I can find so much pleasure in my work. I am proud of myself, always. It feels like the sweetest, easiest kind of good there when I am openly, relentlessly proud of myself.
ismatu gwendolyn
7| The Pleasure of Excellence: How can we “be great” under capitalism?