I wanted to make success the subject of this month’s “Ordinary Things” — my little series, currently being read by, what, ten people? For now, I am choosing to find this intimate rather than statistically concerning.
I have been thinking about success more than I usually do. Not because I have suddenly become a person who enjoys five-year plans or keeps a vision board somewhere near the bed, but because the past year has been professionally untidy enough to keep bringing the subject back into the room. I changed jobs twice ( not my fault, not even a fault) and I am looking for a third, and after explaining this often enough, the story has developed a rhythm of its own. I know which part usually makes someone pause, where I need another sentence, where context helps. None of it is untrue, but repetition gives a temporary situation a strange amount of authority. One difficult year can start behaving as if it has personally reviewed the ten that came before it.
I know better, of course. Knowing better has never been a particularly reliable form of prevention.
Just two days ago, around 6:00 in the morning, I was on a bus to Mount Fuji. It was still early enough for the day to feel unfinished, and my legs were already tired in a way I considered deeply premature. I had barely used them. My backpack sat between my feet, full of layers, food, gloves, water, electrolytes and several objects I had bought with great seriousness the day before and was now regarding with mild suspicion. I kept going through the contents in my head without actually opening the bag, as if something essential might have disappeared somewhere between Tokyo and the next traffic light.
Mostly, I was thinking about my knees.
Somewhere along the road, I noticed how little attention I was paying to the rest of the situation. I was in Japan, alone, on my way to climb Fuji, and none of that was taking up much space in my mind. A few years ago, the same morning would have felt enormous before it had even begun. I would have checked every connection twice, researched every possible problem, asked several people for opinions I had no intention of following and probably sent screenshots to at least one person who had not volunteered to become part of the logistics. Travelling alone would have been a thing in itself. So would being that far away, figuring things out as I went, getting on the right bus, trusting that I would manage whatever came next.
Now the mountain was somewhere ahead and I was wondering whether I had packed too many snacks.
I liked that.
There are things we work very hard to become capable of and then, once we are, the effort disappears from view. The first time is noisy. You remember the preparation because preparation takes up space, the fear because fear has excellent branding, the rehearsed sentence and the route checked for the fourth time. You remember wondering whether you are actually the kind of person who can do the thing you have already decided to do. Then you do it enough times and somewhere along the way the narration stops.
Working in another language used to make me hear myself while I was speaking, editing sentences that had already left my mouth and were therefore, unfortunately, no longer accepting revisions. Now I can argue about a deadline for forty minutes and only remember afterwards that English was once part of the difficulty. Official letters used to change the atmosphere of an afternoon before I even opened them. Now I open one, get irritated by whatever Dutch administrative side quest has arrived, deal with it and continue with my day. Five kilometres used to feel like a proper run. Now I can go much farther and spend half of it wondering how I somehow built a playlist containing no music I want to hear.
The easier these things became, the less they seemed to count.
A few months ago, I was sitting with an old colleague when he told me I was an introvert. Nobody had ever described me that way before, and the word sat strangely between us because it did not resemble the person I had spent most of my life knowing.
I grew up in a large family, where there was always somebody entering the day from somewhere: a sister calling, another one nearby, my mother beginning a conversation from another room with complete confidence that walls were not a serious obstacle, one of my nieces arriving with information that had apparently become urgent during the journey. Plans existed, but people generally had stronger legal rights.
At work I was much the same. I liked knowing people and somehow usually did. I could leave my desk to get coffee and return twenty minutes later with details about somebody’s holiday, somebody else’s relationship and no clear memory of where the coffee had gone. For years I had understood all of this as personality. I was social, curious, easily distracted, always doing something. Moving abroad introduced the slightly less flattering possibility that I had also simply spent most of my life being interrupted.
I still find this funny.
It turned out I could sit quietly. I could spend an evening alone without feeling that the evening needed rescuing, and I could read for hours if nobody appeared asking where something was. The colleague had met a version of me that people back home had very little reason to meet, and neither version felt false. Life had simply given each of them different evidence.
That conversation stayed with me because it made me wonder how much of what I now call personality is simply something I have practised long enough to stop remembering the practice. I say I like travelling alone. I say I am comfortable in unfamiliar places. I say I can work in another language, move somewhere new, figure things out as I go. They come out as facts about me now, with no history attached.
But they have histories. I just don’t tell them anymore.
Maybe that was what I briefly noticed on the bus. I was not sitting there feeling particularly independent or brave. There was no reason to. I was checking my water, thinking about my knees and wondering whether it was too early to eat the snack I had packed for later. The difficult part had happened somewhere much earlier, in all the smaller first times I no longer remember properly.
And yet, if you asked me right now whether I feel successful, I probably would not say yes.
Work is still unfinished, and unfinished things are very good at occupying the foreground. A rejection can arrive in the morning and by lunch sound strangely qualified to comment on ten years of my professional life. One uncertain period can become very persuasive if I let it speak long enough, while everything I once found difficult has already been absorbed into ordinary behaviour and no longer thinks to submit evidence on my behalf.
That may be the part I keep missing. The things I have not managed yet are still visible because I am standing in front of them. The things I already crossed are behind me, and apparently I am not very good at turning around.
Yesterday, for a second, I did.
There had been a version of me for whom that morning would have been the whole story. She would have felt the size of it. I was already sitting inside the same morning, half-awake, with a backpack between my feet, wondering whether it was too early to eat the snack I had packed for later.
I looked out of the window and thought about her for a moment.
Then I checked my water again.