I spent an entire childhood and adolescence thinking that the goal was to have a career and a huge bank account. Something that, in my naivety, I was sure would come from a lot of hard work, study, diligence. My twenties arrived and I discovered that this was not the goal.
I've been thinking about life a lot lately. Not in my life, but in everyone's life. What's her point?
I spent an entire childhood and adolescence thinking that the goal was to have a career and a huge bank account. Something that, in my naivety, I was sure would come from a lot of hard work, study, diligence. My twenties arrived and I discovered that this was not the goal. Lie. I didn't find out at that time.
Even though I thought I was completely wrong about how to achieve the goal, I kept focusing on it as if it were an absolute truth. Without a career and an account full of money, I was a failure. At the height of my 24 years.
Now I can laugh about it , because I am aware that nobody is a failure in a global way (much less in your twenties). I am aware that we fail in several moments and areas of life. And I also know that this will happen, countless times.
Success may lie in accepting the cycles.
Even so, with all this wisdom of the Balzacian woman (laughing at this pretended wisdom, of which I will be ashamed 20 years from now), this feeling of failure never completely left me.
Today I am theoretically a success. Yet I spend hours and hours every week feeling like a failure , for two reasons:
- I don't know how to define my professional life as a career;
- I never had a bank account full of money.
I just let life take me. Often guided by my partner's life. From being rescued so much by him from my depressive crises, I entered a dynamic of not believing that I have a career in which he is not in the equation.
Having abandoned my training area (law), I embraced his area (gastronomy) and loved it. But I spend hours and hours of my days repeating to myself that without him I wouldn't have any restaurant, I wouldn't be hired by anyone to formulate a menu, think about an environment, make a playlist, hire employees, deal with employees, with purchases, with bills.
And, if I stop and think about giving up gastronomy and doing something else that I like, I get into a loop of negative thoughts: not being a journalist, I wouldn't be paid to write. Not being a designer, I wouldn't get paid to do the art I do every week. Alone I feel like I'm nobody.
My last depressive episode was about that. And from her I rescued myself. With help, obviously. I couldn't count on him for that because his dependency was my trigger.
With a lot of therapy, I understood that I have a career. That I can get rid of him professionally if I want to. That I have talents and that they are important for my companies.
Yet I still remain financially alienated. When I abandoned my legal career I closed all my bank accounts. I spent about 5 years without them until I was forced by him to have an account again. Account I never took care of and abandoned two years ago. I don't have a pix. I pass his. And not because of his imposition, but because of my panic.
I don't even know how to explain this panic, it's not rational. I'm charged weekly to get a new RG (mine that I've had since I was 13 was stolen last year and, no, I don't have a driver's license) and go get my card at the bank, or even look at the account through the app. But I don't.
I hate emails and correspondence in general. And I suspect that I only use whatsapp because I don't know how to deactivate the little blue arrows and my interlocutors automatically know that I've read what they want from me.
It's hard to be inside my head. I am fully aware that I have a great life. Even enviable. Even so, I know and only I know how much of a failure I am.
I'm the person who keeps waiting for someone to take me by the hand and make me get a new ID. I'm the person people ask for a job, but who wouldn't be employed by anyone. I'm a success in the shade. A prestigious ghost writer, with no bank account and no documents. That child prodigy who had a bright future.
The times I don't feel like it: when I'm doing the dishes, hanging up the laundry, and cooking. When I'm waiting tables. When I'm chatting with friends or strangers. Because I know how to hide the failure that I am very well from other people. They think I'm a success.
I know how to pretend I'm a success. I know how to occupy my mind with necessary things that nobody will pay me to do. And that's a relief for me.
Moments when I go straight to rock bottom: when I zap on insta. “Look at so-and-so in the Bahamas. I will never go to the Bahamas.” Bahamas. Not even paying for a school for our son has been going on since the pandemic. Imagine traveling abroad. In fact, I don't even have an RG to get a passport.
One of my reliefs has been listening to the news. At least Bolsonaro and his team are more incompetent and irresponsible than I am.
Being a mother eased that feeling a little, at least I'm good at that. But Otto doesn't have an ID either so maybe I'm sinning.
I started the text by saying that I had been thinking about the lives of all people. I lied. It's on my own. I've been wondering if other people have heads as messed up as mine. If they also find relief in the dishes. If they also feel insufficient. I know yes, many times. But I don't know how to get out of this cycle.
I think I need to go back to therapy.
And, in the midst of this immense mental confusion, I was forced by my husband to enter the gym. In his attempt to cheer me up and exercise. It was like this: "I paid for 3 months, now you have to go". My greedy side would never allow me to throw that money in the trash. And he knows it.
I went. In the physical evaluation, the girl asked me: “What is your objective? To lose weight? Fitness?” to which I replied: “stop thinking about killing myself and getting a hard ass”. She didn't know whether to laugh or not. She was taken aback.
And so I began to “train” and found another moment of relief. An hour a day that's all mine. Where I just have to lift iron and leave sweaty and flooded with endorphins. And I've found that the more weight I lift with my butt, the less of a failure I feel.
I, who always went out of my way to say that it was ridiculous for anyone to treat the gym as a commitment, found out that this is not at all ridiculous. I was looking at it from the wrong angle: the gym is not for getting hot or thin. It's to flood our body with endorphins as nature designed it to be flooded in the distant times when we picked berries and fled from predators in inhospitable environments. And it's delicious. I even started this text because I'm in a tailspin because I haven't been to the gym for a week because I'm isolated with Covid.
A confession of failure from endorphin withdrawal. Who would say? Before it was just for the mere existence.
I wrote and then deleted: “ Now that you get what a huge fake I am ”. Because I'm not a fake. I know. I just feel like this. And maybe I just need to get an ID (or two), get my card from the bank, and keep running my businesses, toning my butt, and doing the dishes. And just by doing that maybe I'm being and feeling more successful. Perhaps that is the purpose of life.
Returning to thoughts about life. I grew up with this crazy illusion that at some point someone would crown me as a success and, from that magical moment on, I would have stability in which I could make plans, make decisions and, in short, live happily.
What I've come to understand very recently is that there won't be that moment . And I'm living the purpose of life every day . In the good and in the bad. The extremely busy ones and the ones where I feel guilty about not being busy. And I need to stop looking forward to this moment so I can live the idealized life I programmed for myself as a teenager. I just need to live well, within my reality, improving it as much as possible and dealing with the adversities that appear.
Understanding this has been liberating. And it reflects directly on the values I pass on to my son. Anyway, I can feel less of a failure by looking at my failures as a vulnerability that makes me who I am. And now, with the endorphins kicked in, I like what I see.
( • )
Lívia Farah is a woman who fights, cares and cries, who learns every day to face the world with a thousand demands on her mind and a child in tow.
( • )
chest.me
@putapeita
/bitch
1 comment
Lívia, não sei como a gente chega nesse lugar, mas me identifiquei com várias partes do seu texto. Em especial sobre achar que só tem algo (carreira, sucesso profissional) por estar com um parceiro apoiando. Aqui em casa ambos somos de tecnologia e fizemos faculdade na mesma época, ambos construimos carreiras que nos trazem satisfação e, hoje, recém nomeada como diretora na empresa onde trabalho, eu ainda tenho essa sensação de que sem ele, não teria acontecido. Eu não sei porque a gente vai nesse lugar, mas com a terapia eu tenho conseguido voltar de lá mais rápido, algumas vezes inclusive realmente acredito que sou incrível. Não é sempre, mas houve tempo em que não era nunca. Eu realmente acredito que vou chegar no ponto em que sucesso será me amar completamente e me valorizar como mulher foda sem ouvir a voz da Jéssica (minha impostora) dizendo que é mentira. Eu acredito por mim, eu acredito por todas nós. Receba um abraço quentinho e apertado! Só de ler seu texto verdadeiro, sei que você é muito sucesso! 💜