When your future is a lot farther away than immediate gratification

[ 24 july 2017 ]

My sister left for Chicago this morning, and I had an emotional breakdown on the way to work. I didn’t want to be going to work; I wanted to be going to Chicago. Or Denver. Or Seattle. Or anywhere, really, that was exciting and adventurous and new-experience, personal-growth-y, and forcing myself to buckle down (first at work, then coming home to projects) was the opposite of what I wanted to do.

Work was good. I tried hard, I made progress. Coming home, I ate good food, worked out, and sat down to work on my tracing.

I’ve been reading a book by Carol Dweck on mindsets, the mental frameworks through which people interpret the world. This book has changed my life. It’s about whether you see any aspect of yourself as fixed or growth-oriented: and if you believe you can get better, you’ll try harder. More than just ‘dream it and do it’, Dweck focuses on people’s responses to failure and what effort means: a failure doesn’t label you as a person, merely reveals an area of progress, and effort (instead of being a mark of dumbness, the signal that you’re not a “natural”) becomes itself a measure of intelligence. Are you smart enough to try again? It’s revolutionized the way I see myself and my life, and is really the root reason for my attempts this summer to do hard things and be challenged whenever possible.

As I sat down to practice the ol’ pen tool, a line from her book popped into my head: the qualities of a hero are “the loss, the vulnerability near defeat, then a comeback and a final triumph.” I’m far from a hero, and crying in the car this morning seems much closer to defeat than merely near it, but it reminded me that however difficult my projects feel, a “final triumph” is still within reach. It’s never too late to learn; and the struggle will only make me stronger.

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