Watching Other People Succeed: Is It Holding You Back, or Propelling You Higher?

Wow. That’s already been done.

That space is already taken.

Someone else already rose to the top. That idea has already been claimed.

What else could possibly be invented?

This is what runs through my head when I listen to other people’s success stories. Not from a jealous place. It’s deeper than that. It’s a quiet belief that someone is already sitting at the head of every table. Every meaningful seat filled by someone smarter, more talented, more connected, more experienced.

So you start questioning what you could possibly bring that doesn’t already exist.

A friend said something to me yesterday.

I think my brain is where good ideas go to die.

She meant the ideas that arrive and never leave the room they were born in. I’ve been sitting with that line ever since, because I know exactly where I do my own version of it.

I open the app and it’s a wall of other people’s announcements.

I just signed with an agent. I just published a book. I just made the bestseller list.

All of it real, all of it earned, all of it amazing. And I read it from the base of the foothills, looking up at people standing somewhere near the summit, wondering if the climb is even still available. Is the shelf space already full?

Sometimes other people’s success propels you. It gives you momentum, pulls you forward, shows you the thing is possible.

And sometimes the same exact thing flattens you.

Same input. Opposite effect. The difference is just whatever you already believed about your own seat at the table when you opened the app.

I think this is happening to a lot of people right now. And this time of year magnifies it.

Students are graduating. My daughter is nearly one of them. One minute she’s a curly bleach-blonde girl in jean shorts and Birkenstocks with a backpack. The next she’s in heels and a structured suit carrying what is essentially a briefcase on her way to her internship.

Of course there’s an identity crisis. How could there not be?

The costume changes before the nervous system catches up.

A young friend I had dinner with a few week’s ago put it darker. The real reckoning isn’t a year out from graduation. It’s the anniversary of your first day of work, when it lands that this is the next thirty or forty years.

Most of us hit some version of that. Again and again. For the rest of our lives.

At 22 it sounds like: Who am I in this world now?

At midlife it sounds like:

Am I too old? Too late? Too behind? Does the world even need another voice in this space?

That last one is mine. The one I have to talk myself out of. What could I possibly offer that hasn’t already been said better by someone else.

And yet I keep watching the same truth get authored over and over, by remarkable people, in completely different ways. Same idea. Different carrier. And the carrier is the whole thing.

Because people don’t connect to ideas.

They connect to energy. Perspective. Voice. Timing. The particular life someone lived before they said the thing.

Twenty people can speak on the exact same topic and one person rearranges something inside you.

Not because the topic was new.

Because the person was.

I listened to Oprah on her podcast recently. She said that for the first time since her original show ended, she finally feels lit up again. Creatively. Like she’d come out of a fog.

And I thought, if Oprah Winfrey can sit in a fog, what makes the rest of us think we’re failing when we do?

Maybe the fog isn’t failure. Maybe it’s just what happens before reinvention.

I did some deep therapy work a few weeks ago. Not the kind that just looks at your past. The kind that goes after the root of what you believe about yourself.

And what I found was something I already knew.

I am not worthy.

I’ve carried that one a long time.

Here’s what I’ve realized in the weeks since. When that belief gets touched, when something leaves me feeling unseen, unheard, like there aren’t enough seats at the table, it doesn’t show up as a thought. It shows up in my body. Something lands in the pit of my belly. A tightness in my chest. My nervous system tangles. I come undone.

Social media is the red light. You open it and you don’t know what’s coming. Some days it’s all golden retrievers. Right now it's gorillas, because I'm getting ready to go gorilla trekking in Rwanda.

And some days it’s a thread of people standing at the summit, and the thing lands in my body before my brain has a say.

For a long time I thought that feeling was information. That it meant something true about me. That I was never worthy of a seat at all.

It isn’t.

I think about one of my first yoga classes. Packed. Wall to wall, mat to mat, inches apart. The instructor brought us into a wide-leg forward fold and invited anyone who wanted to take a headstand.

Oh, dear Lord, I thought. This is going to be dominoes. The whole room coming down on top of each other.

Head below my heart, a window between my legs, I looked back through the sea of people. And there were feet in the air. Solid. Like pillars in the middle of the room.

I wasn’t doing yoga. I was doing watch asana. Marveling at the room, certain I’ll never be able to do that.

Years later I was the one calling for the headstand, in a studio I built that’s twelve years strong. And I was the one with my feet in the air, head rooted to the ground. Or hands planted, feet high overhead. I’m five foot nine and a half, and when I take a handstand I become something that feels indestructible. The tallest pillar in the room.

My beloved studio, Toledo Yoga. Standing proud. Indestructible. Circa 2015.

If I’d stayed in the seat of the student. In watch asana. Tangled in the belief that it wasn’t mine to do.

I’d never have gotten there.

That response. The flatten, the pit of the belly, the voice. It’s coming from an old part of me. An unhealed one. And the difference now is that I can feel it for what it is. Not a verdict. Just a wound getting touched.

When it starts to feel like that childhood game, musical chairs, the music stopping, suddenly not one left for you...

there is.

You just have to go grab it from another room. Pull it up.

Always EDITing,

Leslie

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P.S. Each week, I write about the patterns we don’t see until we name them. Motherhood. Marriage. Grief. The roles we keep playing. Two pieces a week. Tuesday and Sunday. Follow along.

P.P.S. I'm leaving soon for a few weeks overseas. A friend said to me today, people must be so excited to see what you're up to. I'll be honest… that had never once occurred to me. So I'm genuinely curious. Would you want to see the photos? Tell me. I'd love to know.