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Here’s an existential crisis wrapped in a humblebrag: I have achieved all my life goals. You might think that this would render me unable to complain, but like any real high achiever, I still find a way.
I have written two and half mostly well-received books; spent a year writing a column for a major newspaper; purchased property, no assistance from the bank of mum and dad required; kept my dog alive for 10 years; successfully avoided more bad relationships with milquetoast men than I ever knew was possible; and been fired by my psychiatrist for being “too stable” for him to justify keeping me on as a patient (please do not forward him this piece, I am already spending my therapy budget on patisserie).
Genevieve Novak often regrets scrolling through her phone first thing in the morning.Credit: Simon Schluter
A renaissance woman. A wunderkind. A superstar! So why is dread growing in the space where contentment is supposed to live?
I wonder if this is how Meryl Streep feels. We’re contemporaries, after all. Does she, like me, sit in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in the outer north and feel just a brush of dopamine when someone tells her that she’s brilliant anymore? Does Malala feel like she’s not doing enough, either?
When you’re a child, all anyone asks is what you want to be when you grow up. From behind your school desk, while your teacher is trying to teach you about branches of government, you prop your cheek on your fist and get swallowed into a daydream. You don’t know it yet, but the fantasy you check in on most often is about to set the course for the rest of your life. Subconsciously, you sand down the edges of who you are, shaping yourself into who you could be. You set a goal and keep to it like an oath.
Maybe you wanted to start a business, or have a big family. Maybe you wanted to run an ultra-marathon, if you’re insane. Maybe you just wanted to get out of your hometown. You hope, work, struggle, strive toward the finish line. The longer it eludes you, the harder you pursue it. A sunk-cost fallacy, because your dream has become your identity, and if you let it go, you might just fizzle away. Anyway, you’re sure that all your little unhappinesses would evaporate if you just ticked off this one tiny thing.
And then by some miracle, you do! Congratulations! You’re the wunderkind, the superstar. But just as you’re acclimatising to your euphoria bubble, some well-intentioned person with a sewing needle asks the question that ruins everything: “What’s next?”
Pop! Suddenly, that life-changing achievement is just something that happened yesterday. Everything is the same, except now you have your name on a book, or a medal on your mantle, or the world’s cutest baby on your hip. What was once your high point is now just backstory.
Is that why it’s not enough for Taylor Swift to be the most awarded female artist of all time? Is that why she has to continue to break records, submit self-directed music videos for Best Short Film Academy Awards, create tours that drive so much demand that they break ticketing platforms all over the world? It can’t all have been part of her master plan. At one point, she must have been a little girl dreaming about having a song on the radio.
Does the big chasm inside you ever fill with satisfaction, or do all of your achievements echo around there instead? When is enough going to be enough? The answer can’t always be more, because agreeing to perpetually shifting goalposts is signing a contract for hunger pains at every passing milestone.
‘Just as you’re acclimatising to your euphoria bubble, some well-intentioned person asks the question that ruins everything.’
Maddeningly, because it’s trite, because it’s easy, because my psych used to say this all the time and I love to ignore him, the answer to all this discontent is unfortunately… gratitude.
It’s boring, isn’t it?
But as I obsessively check my phone for a bigwig book agent to get back to me about my third manuscript, bang my head against my desk to work out a plot point, hate-scroll through negative feedback and try to mastermind a story that retains a perfect 5-star rating on Goodreads or – shock of shocks – no one being a prat in the comments section, I try to remember that three years ago, I would have given anything to have these problems.
The next time someone invalidates their congratulations with a question about what’s next, I’m going to try and remind myself that I’ve already done what I came here to do. Bigger, louder, more – it’s not going to fill me up. Eventually, I’ve got to report back to the little daydreamer inside me, and let her awe be enough. Everything else is icing.
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