That word "success" is so strange to me. It's almost like when someone calls to you, and you turn and look behind you, thinking they must mean someone else. Having been born in the 1950's, and never having fully bought into the social and economic paradigm that, later in my life, was presented as the only means to success, I don't know that I really know what it means to be a success in the popularly accepted sense. (And when only a handful of men have the wealth and power of half of the rest of the world, you have to wonder about our yardsticks!) The women in my family did not have careers, or jobs after marriage, and I wonder what they would have said if someone asked them, "Do you consider yourself a success?" The response would probably have been deep, bemused silence or bitter sarcasm. I suspect that until the mid-70's, many women might still have defined success by whether they had married well, and probably considered it a success to have a reasonably safe and ordered existence. I don't know -- do we women think that way at all? "Were you successful in finishing that quilt?" "Were you successful in raising your three kids?" "Were you successful in baking pies for the Thanksgiving meal?" In an obituary, do they ever say, "She was a successful housewife (or schoolteacher or secretary or doctor)" the same way they say, "He was a successful businessman"? Perhaps I'm the one still stuck in past stereotypes, or perhaps my innate non-competitiveness just makes it an impossible concept for me.
And of course there's the duality of "success vs. failure" which I guess I'll leave for the moment, except to say that dualities have become almost impossible for me to deal with. I'm done with "versus."
But there is something to Holden's statement which I need to spend a little time unravelling. The Oxford Dictionary says that success is the "accomplishment of an aim or purpose." I started to think back to moments in my life when I articulated an aim, and the walls I have hit either when that aim was or was not "successfully" accomplished, or I outgrew it. There have been successes, but also a lot of walls of brick, water, stone, you name it. (This current one is a doozy, but I'm still in one piece.)
If Holden is right, and every decision we make is based on what we consider to be success, then it seems to me that this is a crucial moment for me to sift through mixed messages about what success was/is for women, mixed feelings about duality, capitalism, and "making it," and old heartbreak about what simply could never have been. I need to come up with a personal, quirky, forward-thinking definition for my future "success" that I am comfortable with. As this rebirth-day approaches, I will articulate with exquisite care a new aim or mission statement. Many future life decisions may hang on it.
