Category — rhythm and blues

My life has been a continual exercise in making a silk purse from a pig’s ear. Being among the best of my peers served as my starting line. In some unknown ratio, my fierce drive consists of personality and cruelty I faced in grade school and middle school. If I couldn’t be accepted, I could be superior. That particular flavor of isolation is at least a little pleasing. Still, the drive to succeed and surpass is nestled deep in my marrow.

Unending hunger for proving myself beyond all expectation has served me very well. It’s how an agoraphobic high-school dropout with an algebra allergy, the oldest daughter of a middle-class family, came to hold a key financial position in a sizable organization and earn half a bachelor’s degree by her late twenties- in two inch heels and a wedding ring.

It’s also what held me together through the darkness of that life’s unraveling and the emptiness it left behind.

As one would imagine, a desire for vindication is compelling motivation to survive divorce and a diverging of paths with a corporate conglomerate. My limited research reveals its endurance at roughly eighteen months, just in case you were curious.

The best and worst thing about both divorce and entrepreneurship, simply:

There is no one left to argue with.

Going out into the business or dating world in search of a worthy opponent is generally counterproductive, though it certainly is an all-too-popular approach to either endeavor. The alternative is to internalize the competition- every mistake or miscalculation becomes evidence against your worthiness and success is just the midpoint in a constant cycle of proving your worth again and again and again.

Others sense this preoccupation and rightfully withhold investments of value, lest they lose your attention and favor to some shiny object that promises redemption.

My first attempt to combat this weakness was self-control and lack of expression. I learned how to hide my desire, but the best I’ve ever managed is an vague seething that unseats people more than transparency.

Powerless against its force, I made it my scapegoat and tried to eliminate it. This is what led me to my fondness for the works of Buddhist monks; desire is suffering, and my suffering sure as hell felt proportional to my desire. I found untold comfort and wisdom in their logic, but the seeds of doubt and fear were sown in that soil.

If I ever manage to conquer my desire, who will I become?

Whether you love or hate it, my intensity is an integral part of who I am as a person, a woman, and a writer. Most of the time, I love my passion and drive. Except, you know, when it makes me miserable.

A dear friend and sage advised me not to “taste the carrot”. He was speaking of the tendency we have to place more importance on any particular goal than the effort of striving and the value of desire in the creative process. In contemplating that concept, an unrelated mention of the devil as a symbolic representation of ego fit perfectly as the last piece in the puzzle.

Ego tricks us into thinking we know the inner workings of the universe, that we are capable of divining which friendships will endure, the right place for us in the lives of others, or the role of others in our own lives, which business opportunities will seal our success, or even that we are meant to prevail in an endeavor.

Those failures touch that aching, ancient pain all of us carry in some measure- they prove our worst fears about ourselves. Victory carries its own danger, as I am beginning to understand. Walk on water a few times, and every damn fish pond starts to look like a dance floor.

When determination is fueled by a need to prove superiority in the face of rejection, one starts to see any trace of doubt as a direct challenge. Without consideration for what is healthy, realistic, or even possible; the more impossible it is, the more determined I am to make it happen.

Drive and intensity are my gifts, and they bear some of the sweetest fruit I’ve tasted. Love, success, joy, fulfillment, and contentment- these universal desires motivate us to pursue rich and full lives.

Misery only sets in when my ego attempts to dictate how I receive these things, creating objects of desire and perpetuating the illusion that those broad yearnings rely on any one outcome.

The devil really is in the details, y’all.