Pursuit of Joy: Performance Anxiety
Am I having enough joy?
I am on a sabbatical. As I wrote here, to detox the stress and disillusionment of 10 years, I decided to take a break of 100 days. It’s 100 days of no deadline and no alarms. So, my husband and I packed our bags and headed to South America. We are traveling a bit and then visiting family.
As I wind up the first week of my break, after almost a 24-hour journey of multiple flights and buses, I start freaking out. I freak out that a lot of time is lost doing nothing. I haven’t read enough. I haven’t written anything. What about my goal to do push-ups every day? And on and on they go.
After stressing about whether I’m destressing myself enough, I realized how entrenched I am in performance anxiety. As Indians, studies are all we have as kids. We didn’t have a policy of ‘no child left behind’. There were exams from the first grade, and in the absence of a passing score, the kid would be left behind. Being detained was worse than a naked walk of shame in the city square. Most often, an equivalent of even B or C will not receive any approbation. The tiny shoulder carries the burden of pride of the entire family.
So, since I was 5 or 6, I’ve stressed myself about grades. And then, about getting into a good college and getting a good job. Once there was a job, it was about being good at it and having a good performance review. After I moved out of India, having a good performance review was even more essential since it controlled my employment, and the employment controlled my visa.
So, if I had planned to detox a decade of stress, I quickly realized that the backlog of toxins dates to double that. I don’t seem to know how to just be, without the anxiety of a lost moment, without worrying about whether the moment was spent judiciously. I’ve meticulously tracked the output and impact of my actions on each passing day. It feels like I’m performing for an invisible spectator who would assess and reprimand me for poor ‘performance’ during my break.
When I go on a hike, I wonder if my pace is good enough. When I get to the destination, I capture the glorious landscape and wonder if the picture is good enough for posterity. Unless one counts Medium, I’m not on any social media. Nobody knows where I visited, how much and how well I hiked, whether I spotted a guanaco or a puma, or whether the photo I clicked had the right composition. I’m the performer, and I am my audience.
A scene from Young Sheldon comes to mind.
As Mihai Csikszentmihalyi says —
“To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.”
Although I thought I wasn’t addicted to extrinsic dopamine, I have an intrinsic one; I am my taskmaster, and I’ve been riding myself pretty hard. My motivations, rewards, and punishments are truly intrinsic. However, their triggers have been conditioned by years of extrinsic influences.
At this moment, the realization or diagnosis of my ailment is all I have. Even when one part of my brain advises me to learn from the kids, and just enjoy the moment, another part of my brain offers dissonance and calls out that my long-awaited sabbatical only has 92 days remaining. There are so many things to do in life and so little time. On the other hand, life is absurd. We roll up the boulder only to drop it in the end; so what’s even the point?
‘We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing’ — George Bernard Shaw.
I guess I never played to begin with. And I ask myself now — can you play in a pool of puddles without worrying about how to wash your clothes?
If you’re interested in reading about an Indian’s exam addiction, read my rant here: Sniff it, Smoke it, Eat it: Addicted to Exams!
