baby, we belong alone

A happy ending—or a happy turn in your path, toward success—would make you visible, and maybe it would also make you responsible for whatever unhappiness might remain. As long as you’re unsuccessful and invisible, you have an excuse for feeling mildly depressed and mildly dissatisfied. So you tell yourself stories about what would be BAD about doing something you really love. You tell yourself that recognition and coexisting with other talented people would be harrowing. You are a fraud, after all. You don’t really deserve to share a room with other smart people. You deserve to remain invisible. IT’S WHO YOU ARE.

I think many of us feel like we should remain partially hidden, and to do otherwise will magically transform us into major league assholes. We’ve seen recognition and wealth ruin other people, or we’ve IMAGINED that it was ruining them. Or we simply didn’t like the choices someone made after he or she became wildly popular or rich—even though, 9 times out of 10, that choice boiled down to bad taste and nothing else. We treated it as a moral, a lesson about success, when there were plenty of tasteless moves and shitty choices in the mix before and after.

BUT—and this is a little freaky, so pay attention—maybe at some level we consider success itself, or wealth, or even happiness, as reflective of bad taste. Maybe we loved the words someone wrote down on a page somewhere, and we weren’t prepared to see the annoying face associated with the brain that produced those words. Maybe we’re just dicks who don’t like that many TYPES of people, and we can only admire someone if we don’t really know what TYPE OF PERSON he or she is. Once we can associate a person with a TYPE, it ruins everything.

But this is all about prejudice. And you know who thinks this way about “types”? People who hate themselves.

Ask Polly: Why Am I Deathly Afraid of Success?