You Don't Have to Give the Trophies Back

You Don’t Have to Give the Trophies Back

Sometime around early fall 2020, I stopped sleeping. It might have been the stress of trying to rebuild a travel-dependent, event-reliant, stage-centric speaking career in the midst of a pandemic that had decimated travel, shuttered events, and obliterated the stage. Perhaps it was the ever-growing pancake stack of working in the middle of a schoolhouse—or was I homeschooling in the middle of an office? Or maybe it was the night-sweat tsunamis that heralded the unwanted beginnings of perimenopause.

I know more than a few of us stopped sleeping around that same time. So I assumed my sleep issue was your run-of-the-mill, everyday reaction to the coronavirus-coaster we all collectively rode that year. I didn’t know what was causing it—though my guess was (d) all of the above—but for several months, I hardly slept more than three hours a night.

When I don’t get enough sleep, I cease to be able to form words, let alone string those words together in a sentence. This presents a problem when your profession is, say, writer or speaker.

It wasn’t just that I couldn’t form words. I couldn’t remember them either. And numbers? Forget about it. In the 0.8 seconds it took me to turn from the cookbook on the kitchen island to the cabinets directly behind me, I would forget how many teaspoons of sugar went into my apple pie recipe. Nor could I process my husband’s rational, sane, and annoying solution of simply moving the cookbook to the countertop under the cabinets. (At least, not without managing to form some choice words to let him know exactly how unhelpful that helpful suggestion was.)

I was convinced that my brain was broken. I was convinced that I was suffering through some sort of slow-motion, pandemic-related trauma, and that my brain was remapping itself as it does in people who suffer from PTSD. I like my brain, and I needed to form those pretty word sentence things, so I sought professional help.

The shrink diagnosed me pretty quickly (and sadly, quite correctly) after I sat down in the big leather chair in his office. It was a case of the dreaded Overachiever Who Tallies Her Worth in Accolades disease. He put his pad down then and said some rather profound words to me:

“You know, Laura, you don’t have to give the trophies back.”

Possibly you, too, suffer from this same affliction. For years, you plowed ahead, going from one trophy-acquiring project, program, or promotion to the next—never realizing the exertion, exhaustion, and enervation it was drip-drip-dripping into your veins. Suddenly, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and we overachievers were no longer able to muscle through work and home and life issues in our usual Go Big or Go Home! way.

Isaac Newton posited, in his First Law of Physics, that an object in motion stays in motion at the same speed unless some outside force intervenes. The pandemic was that outside force, stopping me in my tracks and bullying me to confront every inadequacy and insecurity I had brushed past as I raced through the airport, the shuttle bus, the conference hall with my perfectly packed carry-on in tow. Suddenly, this human-sized object that had been in motion for decades came to a complete and total stop.

“You’ve been operating at a pretty high level for a pretty long time. We can work on that if you’d like,” the shrink offered.

“But doc, being an overachiever? That’s a feature, not a bug. No thanks,” I demurred.

“How’s your stress level?” he asked.

“Seems fine to me,” I countered.

“But . . . you’re here,” he checkmated. 

It was hard to argue against his keen observations, his perfect personality profiling, and his blunt statement of the obvious. I was there. And I had to face the fact that perhaps I needed to change my ways.

Yes, my brain was broken. Without the giant wagon of trophies I’d been carting around everywhere, I could no longer recognize myself. That realization pushed me to start moving again, but at a completely different speed. Did I really need to crush it? Or could I stop for a while, sit down, breathe, rest?

The answer became pretty clear to me once I recognized my utter revulsion at the people (so . . . many . . . people) on social media talking about using this pandemic downtime to finally learn that third language, or revamp their closet, or master the art of baking sourdough bread. Nope, I didn’t do any of that, in real life or on social media. Somehow, bragging that the I’ll get to it later pile still lingers in my closet doesn’t seem to measure up.

Rather than focusing on the long list of achievements I could collect during the pandemic, I just focused on how I wanted to show up for my friends, my family, my clients. I stopped worrying about the trophies available for me to earn, and about reminding people of the trophies I already had. I just showed up for the people I loved. It got me moving again. 

It turns out that it’s a lot easier to start moving again when you aren’t weighed down by a whole bunch of old trophies.