Do we really have to prove

Do we really have to prove ourselves?

Are attempts to “prove our worth” a form of self-help or self-harm?

by Celine Hosea [CW: anxiety, bullying]

I feel like a white hot star. Shining bright for a moment – before quickly collapsing into a black hole.

“Why can’t you be like them?” my mother would ask.

It’s statements like these that rile me up enough to do something worthwhile. Looking back at my life, I am astonished that someone like me could get this far – considering that I struggled to answer, “What are your passions?” up until now.

What pushed me academically was the sheer strength of my anxiety against social judgement. This pattern of only doing things that were considered socially respectable extended to hobbies. As I deliberately stayed away from artistic pursuits to make time for “more serious hobbies”, like playing the piano and violin. These “hobbies” meant nothing to me, because they did not arise from my passions. They merely refl ected the will of others.

When I got into debate, I wanted to prove myself to my family who labeled me as incompetent because I could not navigate the social nuances of dysfunctional Asian family gatherings. I won international debate competitions, with the hopes that they would fi nally change their opinion on me.

Because of my success in debate, my family members would no longer bring up the awkward silences, blank stares, or words spoken out of turn. My grandma went from calling me “the mute child” to “the only grandchild who is smart enough to bring home a PhD.”

“She won fi rst place Southeast Asia in Yale University!”, my aunt would introduce me, inciting perfunctory oohs and ahhs from her audience. It gave me a temporary boost of self-esteem – before I shrunk back to the nearest corner to chew on my nails.

I did not seek achievements out of praise. I am so anxious about being the centre of attention that even praise would make me uncomfortable. If someone paid enough attention to praise me, they’d also pay enough attention to see me trip and fall. I was so scared of being gossiped about; of being deemed not good enough, of being compared to my beautiful cousins and falling short.

“She’s the fatter sister,” someone would say, comparing me to my skinnier sister. Then they’d follow it up with: “But she’s also the smarter one.” It allowed me to save face a bit.

I started burning out when I went to pre-uni, or the equivalent of community college. I had no real drive, besides going through the motions of what I always did. The remnants of whatever good habits I had carried me enough to graduate valedictorian.

Do we really have to prove ourselves?

Are attempts to “prove our worth” a form of self-help or self-harm?

I don’t know how I managed this. Maybe I worked hard without noticing. But no matter how hard I tried to practice “mindfulness” and “gratitude”, I still couldn’t muster a single fl ying fuck about it. Perhaps it was a result of the pandemic. Perhaps I was depressed. It was an empty, blank spot of my life and the only thing I recalled with vivid clarity was recording my valedictory speech from the comfort of my bedroom.

Moving abroad for uni reignited whatever spark I had left – for a while. One morning, I woke up not to sunlight too heavenly, but to my mother video calling me with an all-too-familiar tone. Picking up the phone, I tossed over the bedsheets to stumble over to the laundry room.

“Child, are you aware that Alice got a full university scholarship?”

“No, I’m not aware.” I said, dumping my monocolor pile of dirty clothes into the laundry.

“You seem completely disinterested.”

“I am,” I replied, closing the circular laundry machine door forcefully.

“Aren’t you upset? Why aren’t you upset?” she asked in disbelief.

“Why? It’s her achievement. Good for her,” I began reaching for my comfort sweets in the kitchen.

“Don’t you feel bad about yourself? It could have been you!” If only you tried harder, I’m certain is what she wanted to say, but she didn’t.

“I know.” I popped open a can of tea from the fridge.

“She bullied you at school! Look where she is now. Don’t you want to prove yourself?”

I went silent. I looked back at my phone and felt tears pooling in my eyes. “I… don’t have to. I’m so sick and tired of having to prove myself to everyone.”

I started coughing, and muted myself from the call.

She talked over my silence: “I’m doing this for your own good. You’re always sad about being not good enough. Don’t you want to be better than her?”

“I don’t have to be better than her!” I sobbed, having unmuted myself, “Because no matter how fi nancially, intellectually, or socially ‘inferior’ someone is, I would never treat them how she did me. That’s what matters, not whether or not I achieved more than her.”She stared at me in shock, like I had just exposed the truth of the universe.

Conversations of this fl avour have manifested themselves in my head as “Connie the Comparer”. Connie always compares my worst work with someone else’s best work. And this someone else is several years ahead of me in the industry. “Who the fuck would read your work when they can read Mary Gaitskill’s?” Connie whispers. Gaitskill has been a writer for decades and Connie completely disregards the tumultuous journey it took for her to get there.

Or even more absurdly, Connie compares my fi eld of work with someone else’s completely irrelevant fi eld of work. “You’re in bio? How pathetic. Not smart enough for the hard sciences, eh?” Soft, my ass! Physics kids don’t have to memorize the fucking Krebs Cycle, glycolysis and gluconeogenesis, and whatever the fuck chemical pathways they have us recall only to be forgotten completely after the exams.

Connie the Comparer makes fun of literally everything I do. “You like sewing? How… quaint,” he smirks. “Why don’t you take up something useful like coding instead? You know your hobby could be automated, right?”

Every fucking thing has to be number one, and Connie’s the neurotic amalgamation of the shadows that have existed throughout my life. I can’t necessarily pinpoint the source of his birth. He wasn’t born from my mother, or family members, or the condescending mansplainers that happen to be my ex-boyfriends.

Although my friends litter me with high praises: my STEM friends would say “You’re so good at writing! And you know so much about philosophy and politics,” and my humanities friends would say, “You’re in STEM? Wow, I could never!”. I think that Connie is right. I will never be exceptional in these fi elds due to my long-term commitment issues.

“My goal after I graduate is to work at Atlassian. Hopefully Apple or Google,” a friend studying Computer Science once told me. “What about you?”

Eyes glazed and half-rolled, I shrugged and said: “Oh, I don’t know. CSL, CSIRO… Big Pharma.”

Truthfully, I wanted to say “the UN” or “to write for The New Yorker”, but those are lofty dreams that I have long dropped, due to wanting to impress my family with a STEM degree.

“She’s the only one in the family doing STEM,” my aunt would say during Chinese New Year.

In uni, my dispassionate and uninvolved study method of reading whatever and submitting whatever wasn’t enough of a carry. Far removed from the people who plagued my insecurities, I felt no pressure to prove myself and faced Ps with complete emotional detachment. Because I no longer saw grades as a measure of someone’s success, it no longer seemed necessary to compare them. Passion is a much more enviable thing.

I am astonished by how often the philosophy of “proving people wrong” is still touted as virtuous by well-intentioned people and self-help media. “Do it for the people who want to see you fail,” recommends a QuotesGram post, with the bold and condensed typeface that is the standard for male-centric motivational social media pages.

I have spent nearly two decades of my life trying to “prove people wrong”, and it has left me a husk of a person devoid of any passions apart from a few respectable achievements.

But when someone asks me how I feel about these achievements, I truthfully admit that my dopamine receptors are unable to latch onto anything that’ll give me any semblance of happiness.

I feel the impulse to smash mirrors because staring into shattered glass is a more accurate refl ection of how I feel: being made up of parts that’ll never consist a whole – the contradicting wills of all those who still haunt my self-conception.

Like a white hot star, I wish I could say that I did not peak at high school. But perhaps I did, if only for a chapter in my life. And now, it is time to start anew.