Flashback

I get flashbacks a lot, when they occur I remember vividly the moments that they centre around, before returning to the present once more.  I recently had one of these moment where I recalled a day in High School where one of our teachers sat with the class and spoke to us about life.  A student who had graduated over the summer had committed suicide, the reason the friends and family had given at the time was that they had failed all of their exams and didn't get the results they wanted for the career and progression path they had laid out, although I would argue that wasn't ostensibly so, from personal experience the reasons people give in public versus those in private differ markedly and the reasons given in private even then aren't always reflective of the mentality and motivation of the person that does it.

We were entering our final year of High School at the time and understandably the teacher in question wanted to ensure that anyone who needed to talk had the opportunity.  She said many things that day which aren't relevant here right now but one thing she did focus on was the emphasis on the point that there is always another way, another chance, if things don't go the way you expect then you need to take time to process that feeling of shock and reflect on the options that you are left with.  In the context of exams she made the point that although the exams we faced were important, if we failed we could repeat them if needed, we could take equivalent courses in the local college if needed, that there were foundation courses there too which did not need them and that although those courses would extend your study by a year or two the point was you could still progress.  Employment too as an option she spoke of the various training programmes and access courses you could use to gain employment if you did not get those exams and even went on to mention the fact that everyone learns in different ways and some people just aren't great at theory and academic environments and prefer practical and vocational environments and again she mentioned how you can access those if you needed them.

What she did that day was to give my entire class context, and I am sure many others received the same talk at some point.  However almost 20 years on now I had the moment of realisation that this talk wasn't just aimed at the class in general but that it was aimed at me and a few others specifically.  The same teacher I recall from years prior at a parent-teacher conference of which we were asked to attend, not everyone did as it was optional for students but I went out of curiosity and I remember that she had said of me specifically that I was top of the class in some subjects and very high in others and whilst that was a great achievement that I shouldn't put so much pressure on myself to be first or to come first at everything.  She said this as diplomatically as she could and I know there was no malice intended, of all the teachers I had in High School there were about 5 that I thought were brilliant at their jobs and I actually respected, the others I thought didn't want to be there anymore than we did.  She was one of the 5 that I believed genuinely cared, and that day she spoke to our class I am quite confident she was not asked to do so, that she did it off her own bat.  That advice however I know came from the recognition that I had a feeling that I had something to prove, and part of that was borne of my experience in primary school were I was set back by the school failing to recognise my accessibility needs due to my eyesight.  In hindsight I think she was trying to tell me I didn't need to prove myself, that I could take things easier than I had been, that message wasn't heard at the time though.

Almost 20 years later upon reflection though these two incidents connected in my mind and I realised belatedly that she had worried the same fate might befall me - and others no doubt, like I said there were a few others that I vied for first place with in most subjects.  For what bearing it has most of us were gay I now know this in hindsight but didn't at the time, and once again the idea that she implied we felt we had something to prove was quite accurate, I don't know the motivations of the others intimately but I do know their ambition and drive did not wane nor did mine for many years after.  I am not in contact with anyone from my High School days and I abandoned Facebook and social networks that connect you to people you actually know many years ago so I don't know where they are or what they are doing now, and I don't mind because I don't think their lives are any of my business really.

When you are young however, your experience of the wider world is limited, there's no real context that you can gain that allows you to accurately judge how successful you are.  This isn't something you really experience until you move beyond your confines and start to interact with the wider world, even then which circles you mix with can influence that impression greatly and it is entirely possible to be completely ignorant to the experiences of others well into adulthood.  You don't realise how good or bad your education is for example at that point in your life until you meet people with different backgrounds and have to compete with them - for me that came in college.  I went to private school for the first 12 years of my education and I was oblivious to the level of education I received until I mixed with people who had public education and state education - I have mentioned the definitions of these in a previous post at some point but as a brief summary in Northern Ireland as in the US, public, state, and private are what you would expect, but in the rest of the UK the words public and private have reversed meanings.  For the sake of clarity my school was not run by the state and although they had fees I didn't have to pay them as I was a legacy student.

Since you don't have the wider context to gauge your level of success in education the only thing you are really left with is your relative success compared to those around you, hence the emphasis I and those few others had on our place in class.  Decades later I have come to completely redefine success as simply being able to achieve happiness, something which I think most people actually find quite hard to do now.  I recognise that the jobs, assets, commodities, and status symbols people covet are all motivations that are fed by the idea that having them will increase their happiness, and it has to be said for some it does.  I know the rhetoric that money can't buy you happiness is often repeated but I am not naive enough to say it can't because it can make your life more comfortable and it can take away some worries both of which can nurture an environment where happiness can flourish, and it can certainly open up a world of opportunity that you otherwise would not have so whilst happiness might not be a commodity in and of itself that you can purchase, money can help create it.

Success and ambition in this regard are often tied to how much wealth you acquire and how much wealth you desire respectively.  I don't define my life in terms of either, mainly because I don't possess much of either - then again as my last year or so has proven I am not particularly happy in my life and I don't know how different that would be if you added a mountain of cash, most of the problems I have aren't things money in and of itself could fix, it could however provide greater physical distance between me and those problems, which I know again will invoke the rhetoric that you can't run away from your problems, but to be honest I did before and I was quite happy for a time, the only problem is they caught up with me in the end - and yet again there is the adage that they always do but I am not convinced that is true either, I guess in many ways I would argue your ability to outrun your problems can also be considered a measure of success, not a very healthy measure but still a valid measure.  That is something I have seen others do, avoid their problems long enough to live a life and die before they have to face the reality of those problems - those left behind were left to clean up the mess though.

There isn't really a point to this post other than to say that even decades can pass before you realise the impact some people have had on your life.  In many ways my recent experience with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy might have been the cause for this realisation, embracing a mentality that traces the origin of thoughts and feelings to their root via all the branches and revisiting pivotal moments that have occurred perhaps is the reason these two events have suddenly been connected in my unconscious mind.  Nevertheless I would still prefer to define my success in terms of happiness not in terms of wealth, if there's any take away I suppose it would be to let that teacher's words echo once more that I don't need to be first all the time, in translation I guess that would mean I don't need to be happy all the time something which I do know to be true but maybe it's worthwhile reminding myself of that fact every now and then.