What success really looks like in life

by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings

We’re sitting around the table, talking about our days like we always do, when my husband says, “We got a negative podcast feedback today.”

“Oh, yeah?” I say.

He tells me about this product manager with Facebook, who wrote in to say that as much as he wants to recommend the show to his friends, he just can’t do it because of my husband’s involvement, because my husband, according to this man, hasn’t had the kind of success people would expect from a business owner giving business advice.

This exchange comes at the beginning of our meal, just before we get to our thankfuls, and, God, it just thoroughly and completely derails me.

So it gets to my turn, and I can barely think of anything that deserves my thanks, my whole mood shot through with rips and holes and great big tears. I think about my lost job and our money worries and what might or might not come next in the lineup of success, and my stomach twists, way deep down.

My husband knows, of course, because he’s that kind of man. He smiles and says, “It doesn’t really matter. I know I’m successful.”

And I know he’s right and I know he knows, but something about it just won’t let me go.

That word, success, is a dirty one, snaking all through my past.

A man’s hasty criticism sends it striking again.

///

I spent my four years of high school constantly stressed about grades.

Because, you see, I wanted to go to college, and I knew my mother, single and alone in her provision for us, could not afford it.

I needed valedictorian, because it was the only way I would make it to college, since valedictorians in Texas gain free tuition at their college of choice.

So I watched those class rankings, every six weeks, like they were life and death.

And then I came out on top, and my classmates held an election just before graduation for all those yearbook awards, Most Beautiful, Most Talented, Most Athletic, Most Popular.

They voted me Most Likely to Succeed.

“Because you’re smart,” they said. “Because you know so much. Because you always find a way.”

They could never have known the pressure that award carried in its flimsy paper particles and its forever photo buried in a maroon yearbook.

I went off to college, 126 miles from home, and I had never been away from home longer than three weeks at a time, and by month two, I wanted so very badly to go home I cried myself to sleep every night.

I missed my mom. I missed my whole family. I missed all the familiar.

But I could not go back, because that is not something a person who was Most Likely to Succeed would do.

So, on the worst nights, I pulled out that coloring page my 15-year-old sister had sent me, the one with Garfield and Odie colored in muted oranges and yellows, the one that said, “Wish you were here,” in a little cloud bubble beside Garfield’s scowling face.

And I whispered what I could never, ever admit to anyone.

I do, too.

///

Success comes breathing down our necks, and its breath is foul and suffocating and inescapable.

Because it is everywhere in the world. In magazines profiling the “most successful” people in the world, according to how much they’re worth in a year’s salary. On billboards where famous personalities tell us to watch their shows. In books and on screens and next door to us, where the Joneses live.

Success looks like how big a business you build in the least amount of time or how much money you have in your bank account.

It looks like big houses and luxury cars and a name that means something when spoken.

Success, the way the world defines it, carries pressure in its scales, and it can hypnotize us into believing its shallow lies.

It will tell us what to do and how to live and who we should be.

I can see its venom weaving in and out of all my younger years. I took jobs and turned others away because of it. I bought a two-door silver five-speed car because of it (two doors looks more successful than four, silver is sleeker than blue, five-speed is faster than automatic). I wanted a bigger ring because of it (because the bigger the diamond, the greater the catch, right?).

I fell hard into its nest.

And then something happened.

///

As college graduation approached, I did not worry like all my friends.

I already had a job at the Houston Chronicle. I had a brand new car and thousands in the bank. I had an engagement ring on my finger.

I was going to be prolific.

For a time, that Most Likely to Succeed award felt just right. I was proving it true.

Money? Check.
Prestigious job? Check.
Husband? Check.

By the end of that year, I would add several writing awards to the list, and later we would start a band and play around town and then the state and then all the way up through the Midwest.

On the road home from a gig in New Mexico, my cell phone rang. It was my mother. My grandmother, she said, was dead.

My grandmother, the one I’d lived with for a year during my childhood, when my parents were divorcing. My grandmother, who had offered her house for six months during that Houston Chronicle job and cried the day I left for San Antonio’s paper. My grandmother, whom I was too busy to sit beside those nights she watched the news and I holed away in a room planning my elaborate Cinderella wedding.

It devastated me, her death. I counted back all those married months, 40 of them, and I had only seen her three times—once after we returned from our honeymoon and she picked us up from the airport and begged us to stay the night, because it was too late to drive from Houston back to San Antonio and she knew we were tired from the flight, and we said no, because we just wanted to get home and get on with our married lives; once for our year anniversary trip to Disney World, when we needed her to drop us by the airport; once when she came down for my firstborn’s baby dedication, when I watched her hold him from the stage while I cried through singing the lullaby I’d written for him.

How had this happened?

My grandmother was a school accountant for all her working life. She never made much money, never had any money in savings because she was too busy buying her grandkids gas so they’d drive to see her or treating her kids to dinner or writing a check for a granddaughter’s wedding dress. She stayed put in a no-chance-for-promotion job because she enjoyed the summers off and the way she could keep her grandkids for whole weeks at a time.

I learned something the day we all gathered to celebrate her life.

I learned, or maybe I always knew, that she was the very definition of success.

///

Success lives in who we are, not what we have.

Success is found in the way we look at our spouse in the middle of an argument. It’s found in the way we talk to our children when they’ve done something wrong. It’s found in the relationships we keep with family and friends and neighbors and strangers.

It’s found in the deepest spaces of a heart.

The world, the ignorant words of others, the critical eyes of people, can make us forget this.

Sometimes people will look at our choices—having and raising six children, turning down a promotion because it would take too much time away from those children, remaining a one-car family because we don’t want the debt—and stamp us unsuccessful because we don’t look like the ideal.

But success can never be measured on the outside. It is held within.

I wish I had realized that sooner in my life.

I will never get back the time I spent pursuing a twisted version of success.

But I can redeem it now.

So tonight, in front of my boys who will one day be men with a whole world and its people trying to tell them what success means, I look my husband in the eye and say, “You are successful in all the ways that matter.”

And then I tick them off, all those successful attributes so much a part of who he is.

We may not have a bank full of money we couldn’t spend in a lifetime or two luxury cars sitting out front or a vacation home in that place we always wanted to live. But what we do have, this life full of laughter and presence and joy, is so much better than all that.

The world can take its success definition and cash it in for an empty life.

I’ll take my full one any day.