You Can Settle

A tweet I saw this morning: “Good enough is not enough. Settling is not the vibe. It’s time to stop believing you cannot experience the best relationships, the best clients, the best health, the best love, and the best success. It’s time to demand more for yourself.” On one hand, I get it and fully believe it. We all deserve to have whatever our best is every day. On the other, there is a world of difference between our best and “the best.” If you are now or have ever been a perfectionist, you know that the desire for anything to be the best it can possibly be at all times is overwhelming and exhausting. And oftentimes, the desire to have “the best” actually leads to anxiety and a rushed end product because you procrastinated out of some decision paralysis because nothing you could create could possibly live up to “the best” image you had in your head.

Sometimes, a lot of the time, settling is a good thing. Let’s start with “the best health”. Say you go through a period of time where you immune system starts fighting with itself and your body gets all out of whack and you get sick approximately every three weeks for awhile. Say once you get out of that period of time and you see all the doctors and follow all the rules they give you and you become obsessed with having the best health possible because you never want to feel crappy again. Say you overdo it in your quest to have the best. You become so focused on numbers (which matter a ton overall but also fluctuate day to day and aren’t meant to run your entire show every moment of the day) that you spend time each day coming up with ways to keep everything optimal all the time. You do all the things all the time and at the end of the day, you still get sick occasionally. You still get injured every so often. No matter how hard you try to have “the best” health, you’re still human and your body is still going to do what it’s going to do and sometimes that means you get sick. Now, you likely don’t get as sick as you used to because you do get all the sleep and hydration and exercise and real rest. But “the best”? Why are you striving for that? Good enough health, for this girl, is amazing. 

I don’t know what it’s like to live in the head of someone who isn’t anxious so when some people strive to have “the best”, it’s entirely possible that they can do so without becoming so single minded that they end up neglecting other important aspects of life in pursuit of a goal. I don’t know what that’s like. When I used to try to have the best instead of my best, it was mostly all I could think about. As a kid this meant I had to get 100 on every assignment ever. Not because I wanted to do better or be better than anyone else, I wanted to beat me. I wanted to get the best grade possible because good enough wasn’t good enough for me. It was bananas because sometimes me best is not 100 on every assignment. It just isn’t. You can’t will yourself or work yourself into 100 on a Calculus assignment if it genuinely feels like it’s breaking your brain because you’ve officially reached your limits in math. When your best is good enough (i.e. you did what you could with what you had and you know there’s truly nothing better you could produce even if you stay up all night and induce a panic attack), settle for good enough. Please.

Enter “the best love.” What does that even mean? Love and our relationship to it is deeply personal and subjective. With the caveat that love NEVER means feeling inferior to the person you’re in a relationship with, NEVER having your body touched or used in a way that you did not fully consent to, and NEVER having to endure physical, emotional, or psychological pain of any kind under the guise of love, love looks very different to everyone and during every season of life. Sometimes love looks like grand declarations and flashy ceremonies. Other times, it looks like installing a new toilet for your person. There is no “best love.” There is absolutely the best love for YOU. But that’s just for you. And your definition or my definition of what best is should absolutely be different, particularly when it comes to what love looks like. Aside from the fact that every human deserves to not only love themselves but also be in relationship with other humans who love them fully, the specifics are just that, specific. Love to me looks like my favorite human getting takeout for us every weekend because weekends are not made for cooking in our house. Love to my favorite human looks like me doing dishes because dishes are his least favorite job to do. The details of love in whatever relationship that involves are the most important parts. Because they are so important, they are highly individual and need not ever be compared to anyone or anything else. 1. Because mind your own business and 2. Because you are the only person who gets to decide what makes you feel loved.

Finally, the most amorphous and head scratching of all, the best success. Truly, how do you define success? I define success as waking up each day, knowing that I have food, clothing, shelter, and that the activities that occupy my day serve the purpose and vision for my life during a given season. So, in law school, I was extremely successful. My purpose was to graduate so I could become a prosecutor (dream job since age 10, still the most best job ever and if the DV system in SC weren’t so sideways and backwards, I’d probably be back doing it soon, but I digress…). My vision was to make those three years as enjoyable as possible with the classes I loved and the ones I had to take that I had absolutely no interest in and the ones I knew I would never use in real life but had professors who were the coolest humans so I took them anyway and loved them (Professor Nancy Combs y’all biggest law badass, super amazing professor), with friends who made everything more fun always, and with lots of delicious food, wine, and that week in October that one year where I had margaritas every night and watched all the baseball. When you are clear on what you want in any situation and you do what you are able to do under the circumstances of that situation to achieve what you want, you are successful. But that’s me. Some people I went to school with defined success by the job they were planning to get after they graduated because it would afford them the opportunity to make significant amounts of money. Not only did their vision of what they wanted and needed to do during those three years look significantly different from mine, their endgame was nothing I would ever want for myself. There was and still never will be any part of me that wants to take part in a months long process to achieve a job at a place where all I do all day is sit in an office and talk to people. And have to keep track of every moment of my day down to 1/6 of the hour. But for so many people I went to school with, that was and still is their definition of success. And that’s awesome. It’s all awesome when anyone gets to do whatever they love and get compensated in a way that allows them to enjoy their life (teachers, nurses, any government attorney on either side of anything, most all people who work in service industries including but not limited too all the people who had to keep working during the pandemic to keep us all fed and clothed do not get compensated appropriately so let’s be clear on that).

With all that, how can we possibly tell people that they should demand “the best success” for themselves? Your version of settling might very well look like my version of success. This can look like being satisfied with your career choices and truly not wondering if the grass is greener anywhere else and having someone you know say, “but don’t you want more?” Why dude? Why is more better? And better for what? If you are truly happy with your choices and your circumstances, why would more be necessary? I’m not saying that being happy with your circumstances means loving every moment and wishing it would never end. That’s not realistic. It also doesn’t always mean loving your relationships with your coworkers cause hoo-boy, sometimes that a whole mess. However, if you love what you are doing, the hard messy parts are worth doing for you. When they aren’t, that’s the time to look for different or better. That’s the time for a big change, a pivot that may look sideways to other people, but looks completely perfect for you. Changing your game when your choices no longer serve you is one of the greatest gifts we have as humans. Always looking out to see if the grass is greener elsewhere though, I don’t get that. That sounds like constantly living low key sad all the time because someone somewhere has it “better” than you. 

There are multitudes of circumstances that many people do not currently have the capacity to change. Most of those circumstances stem from limitations imposed by systemic racism, the patriarchy, and a lot of how capitalism looks in America. The circumstances we have the capacity to change are what I’m focusing on. I never understand staying in circumstances that no longer serve you when you have the capacity to change them. Complaining about what we can actually control and change in a world truly full of uncontrollables confuses me to no end. Like dude, if you don’t like where you live and you have the capacity to move, please stop yelling about where you live and just move. Most people do not have the luxury to pick up and move but if you do, hush your face and move. Plug any controllable circumstance in there. If you can change something and you want to change it, go forth and do it. No one and nothing is stopping you. Choosing to whine about what you don’t have when you have it in your power to get said thing makes absolutely no sense. But at all. I think this connects in some way to always wanting “the best”. 

Is the best something you can buy? Is it a certain way to look or dress? Is it where or what you eat? Is any of it objectively better than anything else? And what are your metrics? Are they the same as anyone else’s? And why does it matter in any way what anyone else’s metrics are? I don’t think there’s every any time that another person’s definition of success should affect your or my level of contentment. I also don’t believe that you or anyone else should place a cap on whatever you define as successful for yourself. Just don’t project what you want on literally anyone else at any time and don’t get jealous about something someone else has, especially if you have the means to get whatever it is that you desire. That’s a post for another day because jealously is also a whole thing I don’t really understand. Again, it seems like you’re just bummed out all the time if you want what other people have. Or if you aren’t bummed out then you are just constantly striving to achieve something because it will afford you some artificial status to make people think highly of you? I don’t know. I really don’t. 

The bottom line with this post is that I don’t feel like anyone should ever feel that they must demand more for themselves in the quest to have “the best” simply because someone somewhere is telling them that should want more. What looks “good enough” to one person is another person’s complete and lovely dream. There should never be a time when we should limit ourselves from achieving anything we have the capacity to achieve, and we should encourage one another at every turn to pursue whatever in life will afford our fellow human beings joy. You can settle. You can settle for whatever feels best for you in any given moment, even if it looks truly bananas to someone else. Do you, be kind to your self and others every step of the way, apologize when you make a mistake, and move on. If having or being “the best” is your endgame and that’s what brings you joy, you do you too. Just please do me a solid be content with your choices without the desire to make others feel like they have to want what you want too. Happy Wednesday!