4 upvotes, 0 direct replies (showing 0)
View submission: Tuesday Check In: How's Everybody's Mental Health?
There's a few different ways to look at this that might be helpful. I think that you are saying that we are only measuring success in your life when we find a long term partner. And the lack of success here is making you feel cynical.
But I want to open this part up a bit. Do we *have* to measure success/failure this way?
While you're in school, are we only measuring success when we find a long term career in engineering? Have you been failing that goal every semester in school? Or are we allowing ourself the space to measure success along the way. That every semester completed is another small success toward our end goal.
Like I don't think you are failing at Engineering everyday because you haven't had a job in engineering yet. But we are seeing our relationship goals this way, let's poke at why and see if we can change that.
I can tell you that I've had to realign my goals because my perceived failing was eating at me. I wasn't making any new close relationships and I had just made it through my career bottleneck when my career took a terrible turn when my whole department shut down due to COVID (i had my dream job). I was honestly feeling really shitty about myself because I wasn't making any life progress. I had to sit down with myself and reevaluate my goals to include the steps along the way and not just whether I had friends in a pass/fail system. My big goals was to form a DnD table and get people to play. And that sounds so silly but I measured success that year by if I was able to invite people to play DnD that week. Did I get the ingredients to make salsa for DnD night? Did I watch some resource videos? Did I print the character sheets I needed?
My first session didn't make me long term friends. But the small amounts of success every week did. I *did* make salsa for each and every table to make my place a more welcoming environment. I *did* print out character sheets for new players. I did invite a TON of people to play. I didn't make a new friends every week and if I measure failure that way I'd feel real shitty about it. But nearly every close friend I have today I played DnD with and I've built up several close relationships through DnD.
So I think we should instead measure our success by the active effort we put into goal, similar to how we might view school.
"This week I did my hygiene routine, I did my exercise, I did my worked on maintaining my mental health and I put myself into new places to make new connections. I put myself in the best position this week to appeal to other people as a potential long term partner, that's success this week"
It's ok that this goal is emotionally complex for us. Part of our mental health maintenance is making sure we don't pick up destructive mindsets that make these goals harder. So I'll pose a few questions to ask yourself (no pressure to answer them here).
Does the perceived failure of this goal hurt more than others? If so, why? Do we have a tendency to measure success/failure against some of our peers that look like they have had success in this area? Are there feelings of "why do they have a partner and not me"?
There's nothing here!