When Achieving Success Doesn’t Feel Good
After achieving goals I’m happy for a split second, then I feel like… meh…
If you had asked me at age 14, “Dammy, what is your number one goal?”
I would have responded, “Moving out of my parent’s house.”
Age 16, “Dammy, what’s your number one goal?”
“Getting my own place.”
18, “Dammy, what’s your number one goal?”
“Getting the hell away from my parents.”
I’m 21 now, and I have recently achieved that goal. After years of ups and downs, I finally did it. Yet, I didn’t feel anything. When I went to sleep that night, I didn’t feel any different than I did the day before. When I woke up the next day, sure there was some novelty in waking up somewhere new, but I didn’t feel any different.
And that pisses me off…
I’ll explain in a minute. First, you need to understand why a 14 year old would be obsessed with leaving his parents’ house.
I Had A Dream
Some of you can relate…
Strict immigrant parents. Rules that seemed nonsensical. “If you talk back, I’ll…!”
But I watched TV all the time and, on TV, I’d see all kinds of worlds and all kinds of people getting into all kinds of trouble.
And soon enough it occurred to me that the time would come when I’d have to go on my own adventure. You see, in most movies, the adventure started when the main character said goodbye to his family and friends to enter the unknown. So a logical next step printed itself in my mind…
In order for my adventure to really start, I would have to depart from my parents.
I must admit, it wasn’t as logical as I laid it out here, it was mostly subconscious, I think. What’s sure is that at the age of 14, I knew I was going to travel far away from my family to go achieve something incredible.
At the same time, I found out about money and began realising the impact having loads of money could have on my family.
By age 16 my dream had calcified into a concrete plan: make fuck loads of money and help my parents with it. But I was yet to take the first step. Moving out.
An Unanswered Call To Adventure
At age 16 my entire family moved from Italy to the UK.
Imagine going from an opportunity desert to an oasis of opportunities where you can virtually achieve anything.
It was clear to me that if I was going to go on my adventure, it would be here in the UK. Sadly, as the law goes, you require your parents’ consent to move out and 16 and if you do without their consent, you’ll be taken to a foster home or worse.
I must admit, that prospect scared me at 16, so I waited, for opportunities to show up. Luckily, I wouldn’t have to wait long…
I figured out, that if I could start helping small businesses with their online marketing, they would pay me and if I helped enough businesses, I would be able to move out.
Great plan, right? There was just a little hurdle to get over…
Remember how my parents were strict when I was young? Well, they never stopped. Imagine trying to start an enterprise while going to school, time impaired because if you’re not home by a certain time, your phone blows up with phone calls from mom.
Being conservative people, my parents would have never approved of me starting a business as a teenager so I kept it secret, for years. Without realising, my goal changed from leaving my parents’ house as soon as possible to making enough money to impress my parents so they would let me move out.
(…I believe, I developed some sort of Stockholm syndrome which skewed my view of the situation… Many immigrant children go through a similar situation. I hope the next generation of parents does better…)
Killing The Dragon
I wonder…
How does the hero feel after cutting off the dragon’s head? How does the princess feel after the frog she kissed became a prince? How does the athlete feel after finishing a marathon?
You know, it took me 4 years to realise I had lost sight of my dragon: moving out of my parents’ house to go have an adventure.
It happened all in one day, where I cried for the first time in forever. Maybe the tears washed away the blinders in my eyes, because the next day, I got to work and did what I should have done from the beginning.
I got a minimum wage job, worked hard, saved some money and moved out.
Killing my dragon was that simple.
And now I’m here. Alone in my flat, on the verge of going on the wildest adventure of my life — which, by the way, involves becoming the world’s number 1 storyteller.
Yet I don’t feel good. Or bad.
I feel like writing, that’s all.
So I asked the all-knowing Google what this might be, and I was given 411,000,000 possible answers in 0.42 seconds.
The Emotional Dampener
I feel some sort of layer between my thoughts and my emotions. Sometimes that layer’s thick, sometimes it’s thin. Regardless, it’s there. And I’m not the only one…
Apparently, it’s called Alexithymia, I feel like they just make up scientific names for everything these days. Anyway, check it out if you feel the same way.
According to Google, it’s something that happens when people have been through a lot of emotional traumas during childhood. They stop themselves from feeling emotions too strongly as a defence mechanism. As they grow, that becomes ingrained in them until they become like me.
There’s a cure for it, though, which sucks.
… Guess we’ll just have to shut the fuck up, stop being wusses and get on with our lives…
