Reach a little further, Timmy! (www.eldridgepark.us)

“I’m so excited for you!” exclaims a junior friend. Well, that makes one of us. After 22 years of being told what to do and where to be, after 17+ years of identifying myself as “student,” I find that any stirrings of excitement are promptly quashed by one dominating emotion — terror — as I think of graduation. It is the product of years’ worth of accumulated anxiety about that nebulous thing called my future.

We’ve got well-stocked resumes, plus an Ivy League name to back us up. Sounds perfect — I can’t figure out why I’m so anxious. New York Times columnist Judith Warner has an answer, and it has to do with the fact that we are a group of relatively high achievers here at Penn. Warner herself, as a Harvard alum and author of a New York Times bestseller, knows a thing or two about overachievers. She writes in piece entitled “Looking beyond the Brass Ring,” “A lot of success early in life can be a real liability–if you buy into it. Brass rings keep getting suspended higher and higher as you grow older.” At this point, we can’t settle for anything short of saving the world.

The article unleashed a storm of response. Commenter #103 responded to the column by saying, “…we reach a point when there’s no life syllabus to follow anymore. Without structure to measure expectations and achievement, we super-achievers get very, very nervous.” She says of her underachieving adult friends, “They are afraid of who they could be, because it may not be as good as what they were told they were 10 years ago–in high school–when life was hectic, but the goal was simple: to get into a good college.”

The problem with “brass rings,” says Warner, is that “they have a way of turning to dust in your hands.” The solution, then, isn’t to stop reaching for rings — while we don’t need to save the world, the truth is, a lot of us have our hearts set on it. But if we’re going to reach for rings, they gotta be the real deal. And the beauty of it all is that the world needs saving in more ways than one. So take your pick–whether it’s silver, gold, or platinum, you won’t go wrong.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 1:56 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.