Hot Topic: Success

After a 4-day extended family trip to Bali, I've been bombarded with questions about my university major and what I want to do once I graduate. If you've read my other Hot Topic article, you would know that I absolutely do not know what I want to do with my life. So asking me a simple obligatory question had become a conundrum that shook me to the very core. This was made worse when my undergraduate cousin and I talked about how all of our cousins are relatively successful and they're all under 35. Because now not only do I have to match the family's standard of success, but I also have an intrinsic duty to be successful on my own. Maybe it's the Asian thing, or maybe because my parents have been so good to me that I kind of have to repay them with the pride I give them. Monetary payback isn't as good as giving your parents something to brag about. Seriously. Besides, what can I give my parents that they don't already have?

Let's get to it:

Success, to me, is to earn a more-than-comfortable living, and have your name well-known in the field you're in, or better yet, well-known throughout the world. Because success is relative to age, when you're young, people don't expect you to achieve anything great because, well, why would you? For all they know, us teenagers bum around in front of our computers, furiously masturbating whilst simultaneously eating a bag of BBQ Doritos. So when 15 year-old Katie Ledecky wins a gold medal in the Olympics for her 800m freestyle, or when 15 year-old Jack Andraka invents a groundbreaking cancer test, their age becomes relevant enough to be put in the headlines. Now there's this unspoken race to success, because more and more youngsters are swimming in a pool of money, whether they are entrepreneurs, athletes or actors. 

So you understand the predicament I am in: an 18 year-old with no dreams, no goals, and no notable talents I can definitely fall back on (my mediocrity is overwhelming). Don't get me wrong, I'm not undermining myself, but I am putting myself in the same range as most people my age who at least kind of know where they're heading in life, and have the abilities to achieve it. I can do this and that, but it's nothing special. When I finish a painting, I see child art prodigy Akiane Kramarik's work when she was 8 and I spiral back into a pit of self-loathing. Or when I finish an article on this blog and I think to myself, "this is pretty well written, if I do say so myself!" I find out that Frankenstein's Mary Shelley wrote the manuscript at the age of 19. You see how whatever I do, whatever I'm proud of, there's always something better out there done by someone my age or younger. It cripples my self-esteem to know that I am subpar in nearly everything I do (compared to the rest of the world), and yet I still have a voice inside me that screams, "YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO FAIL."

It doesn't help that when people ask me what I like to do, I have this awkward pause before I go, "well I like to draw...and write." Because people assume that when you like to do something, you are good at it. I mean, if you like something, it means you do it often enough to develop good skills. If someone tells me they like to sing and dance, I assume that they've dedicated enough time to sing like an angel and dance like MJ. So I don't want to get people's hopes up, because they'll say, "you should be a painter!" or "you should be an novelist!" or some other outrageous idea based on something I'm not even that good at.
 

No one actually tells me to achieve success, it's kind of a tacit expectation from my parents and family members. My parents have given me the opportunity to go to one of the best high schools in the country, and then to Melbourne for university. They've given me an apartment unit, they give me monthly allowances, and they have pretty much raised me extremely well, despite the complaints I have regarding my mother. Both my parents are the best parents anyone could ask for, and both balance each other out. My father, the patient and whitewashed half, and the other half is my mother, the strict and attentive super Asian. So when my parents sit in my university's graduation ceremony next year, their aging eyes gleaming with pride and their phones recording this momentous event (I'm the youngest so either they're going to be crying that their baby girl is finally an adult or they're going to yawn because they've seen this graduation ceremony two other times), I can't help but to want to give them the best present they can ever ask for; pride. Of course, pride is also relative (everything is) but I want my parents to have that 'I raised her well, that's my girl!' smile when I grace the cover of some magazine or when I get interviewed by ABC. Probably the same look they gave me when I popped out of my mother's womb. Yay, healthy baby girl with 10 fingers and 10 toes. Yes, that look.

So I'm just going to go through life waiting for my big break because that's what happens to most people. "Oh I was shitting in a port-a-potty when some dude wanting to piss asked me to get out and turns out it was Richard Branson and my feces smelled so fantastic that he offered me a job as the regional vice president of Virgin Airways." It's always some ridiculous story or that one time their invention or their business boomed somehow and they suddenly started using rolls of Benjamins instead of tissue paper. Or they started out recording shitty videos in their rooms and now they're these YouTube gods that get millions of views per video and they go on tour because of it. Don't get me wrong, I'm going to work my skinny ass off until my glutes have turned into potatoes, and I'm not going to rely on serendipity, but I don't know when or if Success is going to stop by and invite me over for dinner.

I hope he does, because I am famished.