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Success Doesn’t Feel Like an Orgasm
Sometimes you don’t even know what to do with it.
This little 18-year-old girl screams in ecstasy from her bedroom. Her parents sit in the kitchen, smirking over coffee. Is she having sex up there? Did a serial killer break into the house?
No, she just got accepted into college.
You’ve watched the scene a hundred times. TV commercials. Movies starring Liam Neeson or Bruce Willis as the father.
This is how we’re trained to react to good news. As if we’ve just had mind-blowing sex. Frankly, it’s a problem.
Success doesn’t always feel like that. But we expect it to. That’s why I felt so strange when my tenure letter arrived. The official one. I stood there for half a minute, waiting for the flood of ecstasy.
It didn’t come. And neither did I.
So I said to myself, “Weird,” and finished making dinner. Since then I’ve been wondering what success really feels like. Here’s some thoughts.
Success can feel weird.
We think we know how to feel and act after a big win. We don’t. Not always. Not all of us. Sometimes it feels weird. Like you don’t know what to do with yourself. And that’s fine. Let yourself feel weird.
