The phantom metrics
“I should be farther along by now.”
In my twenties, I constantly felt like I was too old and running out of time for the career I wanted.
By my late thirties, I was fighting to outrun my biological clock, worried about being too old to have children.
What was most painful was this sense that I had done it wrong. That there was some other version of myself that represented where I would be — where I should be — if had made all of the right choices. Or some other person that would have done it right.
I’ve even experienced this on the micro level, believing that a task was taking too long and throwing off my day, or regretting a long break on a demanding project.
What has helped me is to let go of the bifurcations and permutations I imagine as part of my map of the universe. To stay in the here and now: Maybe there are other worlds, but this is the one that I’m in, and there is no other life I’m could be living.
Maybe there are other people who would take the same resources that I have and make something more of them, but they’re them and I’m me. Apples and oranges.
When I intentionally ignore the phantom metrics — the ones that say I’m not moving fast enough or pushing hard enough or doing well enough — I feel much better. I am much more motivated to keep going, working with what I have, and accepting how things have turned out.
The funny part is that it doesn’t matter if this is a lie if it’s soothing. The phantom metrics that can make or break me live on the asymptote between faith and science —that edge that can neither be proven nor disproven.
I’m an experiment of one, with no control. No one can say for sure that I’d be happier or more successful if I had gotten married straight out of college or gotten a real job or traveled the world.
No one can say for sure that I should have put less time into this project and focused on that one.
Yes, you can say that I should have made sure the cap was on the liquid iron supplement before I shook it all over my parents’ lightly colored wool rug. I’ll grant you that one. But the rest is unknowable. Too many variables, too many possibilities.
I’m not saying I have no regrets. I have so many! But regrets are only useful if they can help guide me now by giving me a map of what’s important to me. Otherwise, they just give me more crevasses to worry about falling into. And I can’t live like that.
So whenever I hear myself saying that I should be farther along by now, whether that’s across a ten-year project or a ten-minute one, I try to let it go. If possible, I adjust my actual timeline based on the reality of my pace instead of hanging onto the phantom timeline that might have derived from an unattainable ideal.
The important thing is that I feel good enough about myself and my progress to continue to follow through on my commitments and grow as a person. If I have to gerrymander my expectations in order to make that possible, so be it.
I am the heroine of my story. The world doesn’t revolve around me just because I’m the main character, but the story can’t go on if I get discouraged and give up. Refusing to judge myself by the phantom metrics, I can pay attention to the metrics that matter, and prevail.