The End of My Gold-Star Life
On the collapse of praise-based worth and what comes after.
What do you do with a drunken sailor…? Wait. No. That’s a different question entirely. What do you do with a former “gifted kid” that doesn’t have a driving purpose as a mid-life adult?
I’ve asked myself this question a lot lately, and for the purposes of this essay I am going to pretend we haven’t all read the think-pieces on how the Gifted & Talented programs in school were more harmful than helpful in our development. I personally loved participating and believe that experience was beneficial to me where others might not have seen it as such. That said, let’s talk about what it was like for me…
I bounced around schools a lot as a child. The reasons were many, and none of them good or within my control, but it didn’t change the fact that I attended 14 schools in 2 states before I graduated high school. That’s a whole lot of shakin’ goin’ on. And the adults in my home were not the homework-helping kind. I struggled to make and keep friends, or to put any faith in social interactions at all. I did manage to learn to read fairly early by some miracle and that gave me a sense of comfort and identity, and so I leaned in. I did the reading challenges, took extra care with my writing assignments, took home ribbons from spelling bees and really leaned in to learning how to set my feelings into words. I was a diary addict (still am).
Somewhere around the 3rd grade I got a letter with my report card that said I qualified for the school’s Gifted & Talented program. I took the placement tests, and blew through them with flying colors. The hardest part of getting in was convincing my parents to support it. Since the school handled all the particulars and no extra effort or money was required from them, they signed me up. That’s how, as a 3rd grader, I was bussed to the junior high nearby every day after lunch and took classes with students much older than myself. Once I was on that path I stayed on it for the remainder of my educational life to the point that I already had all the required college credits for an Associates by my sophomore year of high school. Even when we had to switch schools I managed to still stay on that advanced track.
For all of these reasons I received a lot of praise. My family took it as some kind of achievement they had somehow contributed to and used my success as their bragging right. My teachers showered me with shiny foil stars for my star charts. I got plaques and trophies and ribbons for the science fairs and essay contests and other academic competitions. I was given leniency when my home life disrupted my schoolwork, and constant encouragement by school counselors to just stay the course and I would achieve a wonderful life. At every possibly opportunity I was given positive reinforcement that I was special and worthy of celebrating, even when everything outside of school was hell. It was a foregone conclusion that I built my self-worth on a foundation of academic praise.
Going into adulthood, family life aside, I took that over-achiever mindset into the workforce and chased every accolade, every training certificate, every promotion or positive performance review or raise with the hunger of a starved wolf. What was I worth if I wasn’t celebrated for my brain? Who was I if I wasn’t producing results that added to the bottom line? I did this in the corporate world before branching out as a freelance writer and entrepreneur, and even then the number of proverbial gold stars on my chart would be the way I defined the quality of my life. And the more money I made and more placements my writing got , the more I defined myself by those metrics until one day it all came to a screeching halt.
March 21st, 2020 I received the last affiliate commission on the events-focused site I write for that I would get for almost 4 years. A metric I measured my worth by. What started as a 2 week social distancing order turned into a complete shutdown of social gathering that lasted years and completely annihilated my business model, rendering decades of work nearly worthless.
And here’s the funny part. When you grow up being rewarded for performance, that wiring doesn’t just melt away. It mutates. Sometimes into perfectionism, sometimes into burnout, and sometimes, if I’m being honest, into a very specific adult enthusiasm for being told you’ve done well. The gifted-kid-to-praise-kink pipeline is real and I am Exhibit A.
Not one to tuck and run, I pivoted my focus to being the best damned caretaker and homemaker I could be while seeking alternative signs of accomplishment. What followed is what can only be described as a series of slow-moving train wrecks in my personal life that had effects that would last all the way up until present day. Things so wild and outside of my control that I cannot begin to figure out how to explain them on paper. Every compassionate bone in my body was tested. Every avenue of self-satisfaction I drove down suddenly developed a sinkhole. And just when I thought I had adapted… life made sure I understood the lesson in full.
Before I had a chance to rebuild my business or my sense of direction, everything else fell apart at once. Losing the big house, fast-tracking a tiny-compound plan we weren’t prepared for, My (now ex) girlfriend’s family health crisis that rearranged the emotional architecture of our entire relationship, Aaron’s heart attack… every pillar I leaned on collapsed in a chain reaction. And here’s the sick cosmic joke: gifted kids don’t get trained for failure. We get trained for recalculation, over-preparation, white-knuckling our way into being exceptional. So I did what I always do. I doubled down. I hustled harder. I wrote twenty articles a day. I took contract work. I cooked every meal. I cleaned every mess. I tried to help keep two households afloat with the sheer force of my will. If someone needed something, I made sure I was the one who delivered it. My entire self-worth was tied to constant output, except now it made no difference. Effort no longer equaled reward. Praise wasn’t coming. The scoreboard was gone. There was no metric left to chase but survival.
So I crashed. I entered what the kids like to call functional freeze. Executive dysfunction. Burnout. And in that crash I stopped serving anyone… I barely served myself. I went from doing everything for everyone to barely showering, cooking only when I had to, abandoning my writing for weeks at a time, not showing up for anything, and do you know what happened? Nothing.
Nobody complained. Things didn’t get worse. In fact they got a little better because I wasn’t run ragged. My nervous system started to recover. The people around me stepped up and just started rowing this boat without missing a beat. They didn’t question my self-isolation or the change in my output. They gave me breathing room to just be for a while, and in that space I was changed. The constant need to measure my success by putting my effort into things that would crash and burn whether I got involved or not literally forced me to just stop and realize it’s bullshit. It’s all bullshit.
I came to the same revelation so many of my elders tried to tell me about… productivity isn’t all its’ cracked up to be. Doing more isn’t always the answer. All that pressure to be and do and give… that was all coming from me. Now the only gold stars I chase are the moments where I sit back and contentedly look at the life I have, earned by all that early effort but no longer requiring so much of it. And the only praise I seek is the kind a good girl doesn’t share on a free essay post 😉
Drinking: Traveller – from Chris Stapleton & Buffalo Trace
Listening To: The sound of the wind through the thinning trees behind my house.
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