The Fear of Falling Behind
2 years after returning from abroad, I learn to accept that it’s a long journey to build the life I want
It’s been almost two years since I moved back home after living abroad for four years. I am adjusting back to life in the U.S. on so many fronts: I have grown my relationship with my boyfriend, put energy into creating a robust friend circle, re-introduce myself to my family, adjusted to working in corporate America, and continue to heal from past traumas. I am doing quite a lot! Yet I also have a fear that I am falling behind. When I see that others around me are “further” ahead of me in life, based on the yardstick of life milestones, I start feeling an anxiety that I have not accomplished more in my life. Then my brain does something funny. It starts ignoring the work I have in front of me and starts focusing far into the future.
“Life would be perfect if only I was a manager! I would be so happy if I had a baby!” my mind tells me. I know that is logically not true. Sure, I could potentially feel proud of myself for achieving these milestones, but both these commitments also come with more work and stress. A management job can seem privileged and elevate one’s importance at work, but it also comes with additional responsibilities and stress from having to deal with potentially difficult personalities. Similarly, a baby tends to take over any couple’s life, adds big expenses, and requires around-the-clock care and attention. Yet, it is so easy to get wrapped up in these ideas as mental distractions from any unpleasantness or arduous situations in my life.
What is going on?
Firstly, the fear of falling behind is not a new feeling for me. I grew up in a very competitive family so being the best in tangible achievements was a big pressure growing up. Who went to the best college, who drove the most high-end cars and had the most expensive cellphones is what my family cared about. Thus, the fear of falling behind has plagued me for a long time; it lurked in the background and pressured me to reach life milestones when it seemed like everyone around me was doing it. I was scared of being the last one to end up in a relationship, get married, have kids, or get a promotion at work. Thus, I would put pressure on myself to make things happen. Fast. I’d pressure my boyfriend about getting married or ask my boss for a promotion at work. Then when my wish was granted and I got the promotion at work, I wondered if I maybe took on too much and did not appreciate my free time enough. Similarly, my boyfriend would tell me I’m putting too much pressure on him to move forward quickly.
The key phrase here is: “It seemed like everyone around me was doing it.”
Thinking in black-and-white terms using words like everyone, forever, always, never, impossible, and perfect is a dangerous habit as it tends to lead to a skewed idea of reality and prevents viewing the world as it is — complex and nuanced. According to Rebecca Joy Stanborough, MFA, habitually black-and-white or dichotomous thinking can lead to damage to one’s mental and physical health, sabotage one’s career, and disrupt relationships. Dichotomous thinking can lead to increased levels of anxiety and depression because it can lead to rumination and negative perfectionism.
For me, dichotomous thinking contributed to the fear of being left behind. My thought process was “Everyone is getting ahead except for me! Everyone is becoming a manager or mother and I’m not. I’m falling behind.” Thinking in this extreme and absolute way brought on anxiety. More importantly, it is wrong! Many people remain individual contributors or childless. By subscribing to a distorted worldview, I raise my anxiety levels and put pressure on myself to do things before I’m truly ready. For example, I may take on more work and responsibilities when I don’t need to. Then I run the risk of burnout and dropped commitments.
In my pursuit to ease my fears of falling behind, I tried to set ambitious deadlines for life milestones. “I’ll get a dog a month after I return to the States!” I told myself. In reality, I wasn’t ready to adopt a dog until half a year after my return. I tried to do the same with relationship milestones. “I’ll get engaged in two years!” In reality, I don’t feel ready to be engaged after two years. I don’t even know when I’m going to feel ready. The point is, setting hard deadlines for life just doesn’t work. I need to let things in my life unfold organically. Sometimes I reach a goal I set for myself. Sometimes I realize my goal was unrealistic and adjust my expectations. Sometimes I even decide I’m not interested in pursuing the goal anymore because I’m not willing to pay the price to reach that particular goal.
Secondly, I realized that I was looking for a magical solution or shortcut to avoid the hard stuff I was currently facing. Unfortunately, adding a management job or baby to my life will not make my current challenges disappear. It isn’t easy adjusting to home after many years abroad. Relationships take work and tend to bring up unresolved trauma and attachment wounds. My family is quite difficult to deal with which is why I distanced myself from them in the first place. Work can ask a lot of me and leave me exhausted at the end of the day. It takes time and isn’t easy to make new friends in adulthood. Putting in the work at therapy to recognize the truth of my issues and find the right solutions takes a lot of mental and emotional energy. All of these are multi-year (or decade-long) goals where it can be difficult to assess my progress.
Some of the work is particularly tough, sad, exhausting, and frustrating. It would be nice to be able to skip the tough parts…but that’s just not realistic. When I step back to evaluate my journey, I see that it hasn’t been that long since I started on my goals. Some goals I have been working on for several years already and some are newer goals. Undoubtedly, I have a long journey ahead of me. I cannot take shortcuts or fast-forward through it. I have to live and experience every part of it, as well as come to terms with the tradeoffs I have made (and will need to make in the future). If I am to build the life I want, it will take a lot of time and energy and there is just no way around that. The only way to get there is to choose it day by day.
It’s good to stop and question where the pressure is coming from. Some of the pressure comes from my insecurities and societal expectations. Will I be able to build a long-lasting and healthy relationship? Can I interact with my family and not let them interfere with my goals? I gave up a fun, carefree, and hedonistic life abroad to build a future that would last and my own family. Am I happy with that choice? The other big part is the competitive family environment where comparing one child’s accomplishments with the other was the norm. I am used to receiving remarks from family members on why I haven’t reached this or that milestone or why I’m not doing as well as another family member. I’m working on tuning out the voices of judgemental family members whose opinions don’t hold any weight as they aren’t looking out for my best interests anyway.
“A great deal of psychotherapy has to do with interrupting the depressive plunges or obsessive escapes associated with the flight from mourning to which people are prone. The purpose of mourning is to re-experience and process a pain that could not be processed before, a pain that dwells within us in bitter, undigested form, along with a set of largely unconscious beliefs about ourselves and others that comprise our grudging self.
In exchange for the sadness, however, if we are willing to experience it, maybe the opportunity to locate our own self-caring, the opportunity to become more whole, a deeper capacity for connection, and some restraint on depression. Avoidance almost always feels better in the short term, and almost always leads to worsening symptoms in the long-term. There is a high cost to avoidance, not living your life and allowing the villains to win.” — The Forgiving Self by Robert Karen, Ph.D.
One of the most challenging parts of my return home — and perhaps a big driver of my need for mental escapes — is the difficulty of maintaining a good relationship with my family. The truth is my parents are traumatized people whom I need to deal with regularly. Dealing with traumatized, emotionally immature parents simply sucks. It is draining and trying on so many levels. The more I heal, the more I see the unhealthy patterns my parents are caught in. It breaks my heart to see them living with so much resentment, dysregulation, fear, and unhappiness. The worst part is knowing that they will not change.
It is incredibly sad for me to see them in this state or interact with them for any long periods (e.g., more than several hours). I still experience feelings of injustice and envy when I see others interacting with their emotionally stable parents. While I have done a lot of forgiveness work with both my parents, I still struggle with maintaining proper boundaries with them. Since initiating regular contact with my mother, I have noticed several instances when she tried to emotionally rope me into her difficult situations: dealing with her in-laws and managing her anxiety. Luckily, I was cognizant of what was happening and prevented myself from being sucked into an hours-long vortex of panic.
“Forgiveness does not mean that you should spend more time with your mother or that your relationship will necessarily improve,” according to Christiane Northrup, M.D.
I find these words to be very true.
So here are my answers. I’m at a period in my life when I am making a lot of difficult and heavy transitions. At points, it can be a slog. Some days it can be exciting and fulfilling; other days it can seem boring and like I’m not making much progress. However, I know my goals are focused on exactly what I want to be working on in my life right now. While I’m on my journey, I need to remind myself that my plate is full! My current goal is not to try to fit more into my life. It’s about accepting where I am and being patient with myself. I’m doing my best and making progress every day on meaningful things even if it’s not easy to see. That’s enough for me.
In the meantime, I can be kind to myself and practice gratitude and self-care. I can focus on the experience I’m having and what I’m learning from it rather than on ideas and preconceived notions. It also wouldn’t hurt to stop comparing my life to other people’s lives. Asians, in particular, have a bad habit of measuring milestones by a person’s age. I have the habit myself and need to unsubscribe from that way of thinking. I can also detach myself from my family’s competitive culture and focus on my own progress. I can try to be judicious and avoid the tendency to indulge in premature and unrealistic expectations in the future. I can be open and flexible to pivoting when things do not go as I expect. The most important thing is to do what fits me on my timeline.