Confessions of a Recovering Performance Junkie

By noon yesterday, I was already feeling like a big fat failure.

It started when I received a rejection notice from the media outlet where I had submitted a recent article for publication. You have to have thick skin if you’re a writer; rejection is part of the game. But I was hormonal yesterday, and I actually thought the article was a perfect fit for the outlet. I had grand dreams of it launching important national conversations about things that matter to me. I wanted my ideas to be heard. I wanted to help solve the problems on a broader scale. It wasn’t my turn.

No sooner did I receive my rejection notice than I learned that my kid’s math grade was in the crapper with very little time to resuscitate it. My heart sank. Catastrophic mom fail. In my head, my kid is supposed to graduate with honors because, let’s be honest, he’s smart enough, so why not? I’ve never had to police his grades before because he’s always managed to self-regulate just fine, so this unfortunate development was a surprise to me, and I judged myself for falling down on the job. My homeschool mom friends would never have let this happen.

I guess I shouldn’t be too terribly surprised that my child struggles in the math department. He’s my kid, after all. As a college freshman, I didn’t even meet the minimum requirements for freshman math, so they funneled me into some remedial course called “Math for Liberal Arts” to help me meet my quota so I could move on with my life, blissfully detached from the sorcery of quadratic equations and inverse operations.

But here we were, my kid falling behind with a mom incapable of even helping him identify where he went wrong, and I just felt heavy and dejected and crappy. I tried to distract myself by focusing on doing small tasks well—playing attentively with my toddler, wiping down the countertops, chopping up vegetables and cooking a healthy meal for my family. But even that backfired when the olive oil dripped onto the oven floor and burst into small flames, which I quickly contained before plopping myself down on the couch in defeat.

I just sat there staring blankly at the wall as my 2-year-old decided it would be the perfect time to melt down. He wedged himself against my lap and began to bellow. I lifted him up, forced his head against my chest, and just rocked him, slowly breathing in the smell of his perfect little baby skin and reminding myself to breathe and trust God because none of these problems were actually that consequential in the real world and life would absolutely go on regardless of how much I allowed myself to mope.

But that was the source of the problem, now that I think of it—the trusting God bit. Because I had already decided that God was rejecting me, too, a perfectly absurd and ungrateful conclusion to draw given the sum total of miraculous events that have shaped my entire existence. It is no small comfort to me that even the great prophets of the Bible were often moody and emotionally unstable and prone to hysterical pouting sessions despite the fact that they literally heard the voice of the Creator of the universe.

It had really started on Sunday, if I’m honest—this downward decline into wallowing in self-pity. We had a powerful guest preacher at church, a man known specifically for his prophetic ministry. I was excited to attend the service because I was hopeful he would have a word from God specifically for me or my family. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten one of these, but they’re always so life changing when they come, and I was hungry for fresh revelation and direction. To make a long story short, we didn’t get one. Other people did. In fact, some people even received the specific prophetic words I wanted for myself, and I was absolutely encouraged to see God show up in big ways for them. But the long and short of it is that I was also jealous, and I interpreted the absence of a personal word from God as a form of rejection, which really set the pace for the rest of my week.

I felt inadequate, invisible, unworthy, overlooked, all terrible triggers for a recovering performance junkie who fights very hard to remember she’s loved because she’s made in God’s image, not because she can do hard, important things.

By the time I remembered to pray about all the feels, the Holy Spirit was already nudging me. “You don’t have to do or be the best, and neither do your kids. It’s okay if someone else writes the article that puts the nail in the coffin of your pet issue. It’s okay if your son isn’t valedictorian. It’s okay if your daughter is a faithful worship leader instead of a global performing artist. It’s okay if you help a handful of people by writing an honest blog rather than helping millions of people by writing a masterpiece in The New York Times.”

I’m a charismatic now, but one of the things I do miss from my Reformed upbringing are the hymns, many of which are permanently catalogued in the recesses of my mind. There’s a verse from one of them that popped into my head as I stewed on all of this. It’s a prayer that reads as follows:

“I ask Thee for the daily strength.
(To none that ask, denied),
A mind to blend with outward life,
While keeping at Thy side.
Content to fill a little space
If Thou be glorified.”

He’s teaching me what this means in this season.