Catch Up from Second Place

I find satisfaction with the Here and Now absolutely impossible. There’s always something else I should be doing, always a way I need to be better, always a scratching in the back of my head that whatever is happening right now is not enough, always a feeling of playing catch up with something I can’t name. I should be working harder, eating better, doing more, seeing more, travelling, staying afloat. I can’t exactly pin down the nuts and bolts of what I should do but I beat myself up for not doing it.

I’ve thought a lot about why I constantly have the feeling of chasing something unidentifiable, and I think it’s fundamentally linked to a feeling of inferiority; a sense of being forever in second place. I’d conjure a visual metaphor of being in second place and chasing some idealised personification of what first place looks like, but we’re all better than that. First place is the sort of person that immediately replies to emails, looks like they know what they’re doing because they genuinely do, spends weekends putting up shelves for elderly relatives, has a five year plan, they actually like sourdough.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with feeling driven to be productive or having the desire to change things around you, but when there is little satisfaction to be found in the present and no trajectory or end goal for change, this lack of presence in the Here and Now can become an issue. Striving to be this perfect person, playing catch up with something that absolutely does not exist, becomes a problem.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: there is Good Anxiety and Bad Anxiety. Good Anxiety gets shit done. I genuinely attribute a lot of my achievements to the ability to positively channel anxiety at certain moments in my life, so I don’t always necessarily see anxiety as a bad thing. Good anxiety is an encouraging Stephen Fry-esque character, gently scribing a list of measurable, achievable goals. Bad anxiety is like an annoying kid that’s screaming at you to get shit done, but you have to try and get that shit done while tidying up after this annoying kid. It’s chucked a jar of Dolmio on the floor in Tescos and used its finger to write your to do list on the tiles like some pushy destructive Jackson Pollock with an aggressive disregard for those working in customer service.

Bad Anxiety brings with it a constant need for satisfaction or even perfection, but an almost complete lack of means to get there or any semblance of what it would look like. Had I taken pen to paper five years ago and written down exactly what I wanted my life to be like at this exact moment, I don’t think it would be entirely dissimilar to what my life is like at this exact moment. The reason the fundamentals are missing is this: wherever you go, there you are. I can move to as many different places as I want, make all the friends in the world, fall in love, get a great job, write well- but I’m still me. Still choked by self-imposed pressure to do and be something else. To catch up to an idealised personification of first place.

In order to rid myself of self-imposed pressure, I need to conceptualise and minimise the thing I’m trying to catch up with. Enter Good Anxiety. Good Anxiety is making short and long term lists, managing your own expectations, creating plans and understanding that those plans are not immovable or finite. It’s recognising the past as unchangeable and the future as informed by current choices, while also accepting both as being a product of uncontrollable external factors. It’s taking responsibility, but knowing that you can do everything right and still fall a little short. It’s channelling and focusing anxious energy into something productive, or at the very least not damaging.

Purging self-imposed pressure will come through an understanding that this idealised vision of a person doesn’t exist in any human being on earth. It’s never existed. It’s a manifestation of Bad Anxiety, rather than a measurable, achievable benchmark of success. No one knows exactly what they’re doing, no one’s plans work absolutely perfectly, no one’s journey goes straight from A to B. We can’t all be Adam Driver.