The small town kid works her tail off to get into the right school. Her newfound connections combine with talent and ambition and propel her like rocket fuel to the top of the world, where she enjoys a wildly successful career and a joyful family life. Of course she has all the resources and funds she ever needs and perfect physical and mental health. Every day is a holiday card. 

That’s not the script for the latest Hollywood C-lister flick (although, who knows, maybe it’s that too). It’s the outline of how I thought my life was supposed to go. But since I’m a real person and not a heroine in a half-baked YA series, it didn’t. 

I grew up a bookish kid in a small town in almost the middle of nowhere. Wait, there’s more: I grew up a bookish kid whose father was the mayor of my small town in almost the middle of nowhere. My mother was a figure skating coach whose career had ground to an unexpected halt and my brother had an undiagnosed disability. There was a lot of love in our house but also a lot of frustration. I have to imagine as they faced their own midlife realities, my mom and dad looked at my glowing report cards and pinned what felt like the family hopes and dreams of a modern fairy-tale life on me.

All I had to do, my parents concluded, was attend what was regarded as one of the best colleges in the world. Easy-peasy, just like that, and every opportunity would open to me like an ocean of pearl-filled oysters. 

Reading this now, part of me is like, mmm hmm. Poor little privileged girl. Bout to get disillusioned, aren’t we now. Which yeah, I was. Going to fancy-pantsy college was an incredible opportunity that I was gifted to receive. But it was also my duty, my job and the only choice my parents would support me making. It doesn’t take away the incredible privilege of it all. But as I experienced it, it landed me in a narrow role in which I believed I had no choice but for things to work out swimmingly. And, life being life and all, the reality was more complicated than that. 

Did the world work like this back in the 1960’s? Did holding a brand-name degree open up every door with a flick of your Ivy-wrapped thumb? Does it still?

Maybe, maybe, and no. 

But I believed the unconditional success narrative when I arrived on campus. My campus itself played right along. It was, and is, quite the looker. 

I stocked up on books, tried out for plays and trotted around quads in the New England sun, thrilled to be there and confident that nothing but amazing was on the way. And for the first few months, it was. But around the first of November, a cloud of sadness and agitation descended over my head. I couldn’t figure out why – I was LIVING THE DREAM, goddammit, emotions!!! Why the hell are you acting up NOW, when we’ve done the thing and we’re exactly where we’ve always wanted to be and seemingly the only thing wrong with the flawless portrait that was Williams College that fall was the unwelcome muck bubbling up inside my head?!

My depression was on the cusp of making its nasty-surprise debut , rumbling towards me like a Mack truck. For many years, I pinned the blame for my struggly undergraduate existence on the unwelcome rise of the big bad d. Eff you, brain chemicals, for ruining the perfection my family had dreamed of and I was supposed to achieve.

Now, half my life later, I see a bigger picture. I didn’t know how to cope with depression, but the real double whammy was I didn’t know how to look anything less than accomplished, assured and in control. I didn’t know how to go on, except to withdraw into myself, when I believed I’d done something wrong. I knew how to be part of a community only when I felt smart, strong and productive. I did not know how to be a person asking for help or a person visibly hurting. Which is to say, I didn’t know how to be much of a person at all beyond the person I’d thought it was my job to be. That person was a poised-on-the-outside young woman who blazed through manufactured challenges like tests, essays and athletic competitions and had little concept of what it was like to live through problems that had to be coped with rather than solved. 

You could call that spoiled. You could definitely call that privileged. But you could also call it painfully immature and sad. I saw myself, in both my family and the world at large, as a kind of nerdy superhero bounding through challenges.  Problems were something that I either had to solve, or wasn’t allowed to have. At that time, I didn’t find the right tools or culture in the environment of school to show me a kinder way of living. However I was, and am, incredibly grateful for the unlimited counseling visits. 

There were some true friends and fun moments along the way, but overall, college was a rough go. During my senior year, I sent out carefully crafted cover letters to human services jobs that paid less than a year of my tuition and failed to hear back from any of them. Upon graduation, I stuck my degree in my sock drawer. Not because I didn’t care about it, but because I felt like I’d failed to live up to the golden opportunities of my alma mater. It was like I’d made it to the banquet room but spent most of the party struggling to get out from under the table. It didn’t help after graduation, when I actually avoided contact with friends because I was miserable at the job I managed to land and was convinced that everyone else was following the ‘right’ magical dance steps that had somehow managed to elude me. 

I’m telling you all, a perfectionist does such a great job beating their own ass to a pulp that we seriously don’t need any enemies. What I needed, and stumbled into over the years that followed, were things like grace and inclusion, perspective and hope. And I started to learn those things, gradually and messily and with time, when I started doing advocacy for the disability community. I learned more during my unexpected crash landing in the psychiatric hospital, and during the months of recovery when I stumbled into a truly inclusive nonjudgmental church holding my newborn. I feel grace and inclusion now when I’m seen and embraced by people, even when they see what a barely-holding-it-together mess I feel. The great thing is, then they can show me what a barely-holding-it-together mess they feel. And we’re not, actually, barely-keeping-it-together messes…..most of the time. Working life like a team of sherpas turns out to be a way, way better thing than keeping up the facade of a one-person commando. It’s one of those truisms that sounds glaringly obvious, but count me among those who had to learn by living it. And who definitely, definitely did not get this as I headed out into adulthood. 

Coming back to my alma mater, the scene of what I saw as my painfully underwhelming life launch. Is there a way to reclaim this part of my story so that it doesn’t revolve around me being the greatest disappointment to ever stalk those perfect quads? Well, yeah. Of course. That harsh perspective is founded on a lie. Describing anyone who stalks this earth as “a disappointment” isn’t seeing their whole picture. 

So we had an opportunity, and we started with a tiny little thing. A family visit to campus. Talking to my daughter about how mama went here, and visiting the rink where I fell in love with skating, and walking the quads that I always loved even as I was ripping myself apart inside. The quads are still their beautiful bucolic selves, but the world looks different now, mostly because I’ve learned not to shred myself from the inside. (And if I do, I’ve got the metaphorical peroxide and bandages handy.)

Happy summer, friends. Here’s to reconsidering so-called failures.