Over achiever

Recently, I was talking to my brother Scott and telling him about this trip I was getting ready for. I was heading to Chicago, where I was to speak at the annual conference of the Association of Educations in Journalism and Mass Communications. I had written a paper for my master's thesis project and it had been accepted. Which meant I got to go to Chicago and tell a panel about my paper, after which they would critique it and offer criticisms. It's Step 1 to having my paper published in an academic journal.

"Geez, Sis," he says. "You've really made it."

"What do you mean?" I  asked him.

"Well, come on, you're happily married, you're having a baby, you're buying a house. You've got a great job, a master's degree and you're speaking at a national conference. Sounds like you've made it to me!"

Of course, I tried to make light of it. "On paper I look really good!"

I was standing in my hotel room overlooking downtown Chicago from 12 stories up on a recent evening thinking about this.


I'd just spent the evening having an incredibly expensive meal with the head of my department at SDSU, the program chair, one of the professors and a former student who now is an associate professor and rising star at Penn State. Of the five of us, I would say Ms. Penn State is the one who has "made it" -- she got out of South Dakota, hired at a prestigious university where she's on the tenure-track, publishes multiple papers a year, gets accepted to all sorts of prestigious summer programs. And yet she still talks about her future -- lamenting that she hasn't had any papers published recently, that she's behind on her book reviews, that she needs to work on her tenure points.

She's made it. Or has she?

After my presentation Thursday afternoon, one of my fellow panelists passed me a note saying, "Great job! Now when will you get your PhD?"

Among academics, I haven't made it. I've barely started. I'm not even in the upper-echelon among journalists. I'm just an entry-level copy editor, struggling to get my boss to admit I could be more. Continuously pushing for promotion, hoping that I'll finally get a chance to show what I can do.

I was pondering to myself how I would know when I'd finally made it. Will that PhD that I eventually want to get seal my success? Will I feel more confident when someone finally allows me to lead a newsroom, or even a portion of one? Will earning tenure and being a published author or researcher be the moment when I finally arrive?

Or, like Ms. Penn State, will I earn success only to lament what I haven't done?

It may seem like shallow grasping-for-gold to others, especially those who feel they have achieved success in parenthood or feel completed by being a great spouse. And in no way to I disparage that. My journey to motherhood, I imagine, will be incredibly fulfilling. But my womb doesn't complete me.

Is it shallow to want worldly achievement and success? I don't think so. The delicate art of balance is found here: To be happy in the journey. And to know it's not really up to you in the end, anyway.

I love my job, I love my husband, I love the house we're attempting to buy. I love that we're going to have a baby. I love our church and our slowly growing circle of friends. I succeed in what I do in most things.

I am happy. But that doesn't mean I stop striving for more. I have to keep reaching. It's the course of having been successful in most of my accomplishments up to this point -- I am compelled to see what else I can do. How much further I can go.What else God may have for me.

And in 25 years or so, I'll have that PhD and hopefully be out of a newsroom and into a classroom. Probably preparing to speak at some conference. And my brother or husband or child will comment on the tragectory of my life in awe, "You've really made it!"

And of course I'll know I haven't. Because I don't think you can make it. That perhaps the secret to happiness in a competitive world. Knowing that you will never be the top, there will always be someone better than you. So instead of being the best, I hope someday to simply reach the point where I can stop reaching -- and still maintain a bit of humility about the whole thing.