My Friends…Cut Yourself Some Slack.

I think there’s an epidemic afoot.

Yesterday, two of my best friends each brought up the same concern: a feeling of failure or being tried and found wanting, compared to other people of our same age and background. 

One referred to herself as suffering from the “never enough” syndrome.  She suggested that this was the fault of the feminist movement: since now women can “do it all,” now we are required to do it all.  (This is actually what Lucinda Coxon’s play Happy Now? is about.)

My other friend just started a chat with me out of nowhere, saying that she needed to get off Facebook because all she could see was high school friends getting engaged and having babies.

They both speculated that maybe Facebook is causing the problems, and maybe the answer is just to stay off of it.  (What’s funny is that each of these conversations happened on Facebook.  Hm.)

Having two of my best friends bring this up – in the same day, no less – really made me think.  After all, who doesn’t Facebook stalk and then envy other people?  That’s the great thing about Facebook: the low-key keeping in touch with people.  It just means that you get to see every time someone makes good, gets married, has another baby, gets another promotion.

Both friends seemed kind of bleak about it though.  Which I get.  We’re 26 years old and all three of us feel like we should by all rights have our careers, our relationships, and our lives in order.  None of us have managed to go 3 for 3, although none of us is doing too badly.  But there are people out there with houses, careers, marriages, kids, dogs, cats, car payments, iPads, vacations, gym memberships, and 14-foot Christmas trees.

They’re not the only friends to ever have this conversation with me, which makes me think that it might be a much more widespread thing (hence the “epidemic”).  There’s pressure on us to be amazing, because we’ve been told our whole lives how awesome we are.  Then at some point each of us ends up leaving our small pond and realizing that we’re not really the giant fish we thought we were.

I think that one reason that I’m a lot more comfortable with my “ordinary” life, is that during my freshman year of college, I lived in a dorm with a bunch of smart geeks – we’re talking math, physics, computer science, engineering, hella smart geeks.  I was one of two English majors in the entire dorm (and the other girl changed majors).  So I figured out pretty quick that I wasn’t going to impress everyone anymore.

(This is the part where I tell the story about the guy in college who, while telling me about his plans to get his physics PhD in the next couple years, said to me, “You’re not smart enough to get a PhD in physics…I mean, I’m sure you’re smart in English or whatever.”  We did not end up dating.  It may have had something to do with that conversation.)

So I’m not having to learn, post-college, that I’m not a unique and perfect extraordinary snowflake.  I figured that out already, and I know how to own it and be happy even if I’m not rich or famous.  I think all my friends who are learning that now are having a harder time with it.

The funny thing is that I have a pretty healthy level of self-esteem.  I know I’m pretty cool, and I know that if we hadn’t gone to New York for 3 years, I could have set up a career for myself in California by this time.  But the time out there, and my adventures and experiences, were totally worth it to me.  I also would rather spend the extra years scraping it together now, while I’m still only 26, than be trotting along in my mid-30s and have everything suddenly swept out from under me.

Both my girlfriends are the same way.  They’ve each had kind of a bumpy time since college, with graduate schools and moves and relocations and other graduate programs.  Give us a few years and we’ll all have things figured out…or at least more figured out than they are now.

In the meantime, I told each of them, maybe staying off Facebook is a good idea if it’s bothering you so much.  But what’s even more fun (and doesn’t require limiting your social networking) is just to practice making fun of other people instead of envying them.  Hey, I too stalk other people’s pictures and feel jealous of how pretty they look or how nice their vacation was or how big their new house is.  But the percentage of people I envy is only, like, 25.  The other 75% of people on Facebook is just begging to be mocked.