Doing more, being more ...

Isabel Sanchez Hodoyan graduated from high school in 2018. I never had the pleasure of being her teacher, but I have certainly seen plenty of students who have suffered through the syndrome that she describes so clearly below. What should we call it? The Do-More, Be-More Syndrome? The Never Enough Syndrome?

Never-Enoughers struggle to find a peaceful space because they are daunted by all of the high-achieving people around them. Seeing these high-flyers soaring and excelling and shining and impressing every person in sight, the Never Enoughers feel hopelessly ordinary and often blame themselves for not doing enough or working hard enough or being amazing enough. Dreamy romantics like Walt Whitman might claim, “I exist as I am, that is enough,” but people affected by the Do-More, Be-More Syndrome feel the opposite: I exist as I am, they say, but it is never, ever enough.

Isabel, a freshman at NYU, is majoring in English and Social & Cultural Analysis. She spends about 80% of her time reading and annotating and the other 20% (and the “majority of my energy,” she says) tutoring students for NYU’s America Reads program.

In her post, Isabel makes a case that this feeling of never measuring up grows organically in independent schools like Parker. “My post is about a sentiment that I carried with me all throughout high school and even today: the need to do more and be more, and not knowing when or if I was/am doing enough and all of the implications that come with said sentiment.”

- C.H.

Parker, for me, was a weird place that seemed to exist outside of rhyme or reason. I spent years feeling academically inferior to peers, and even worse, my closest friends. There was (and still is) a strong sense of competition–a necessity to do more than the person next to you. This feeling was very damaging for me–it’s really hard to feel like an equal in a friendship when you know that you can’t join in on the otherwise shared conversation about AP Gov or AP Bio because you couldn’t take those classes even if you wanted to–my GPA didn’t allow it or I didn’t have the prerequisites; when my course load wasn’t entirely comprised of AP’s, or when I made the decision to not even take precalculus because I knew I wouldn’t do well. I felt excluded and dumb, and I felt (and still feel) like it was my own fault. I constantly grappled with this question: am I being lazy and not putting as much effort as I can into my school work or am I doing as much as I can? I still can’t answer this question, but my Parker mentality makes me inclined to think the former, because settling for less than an A, seemed to me to be just a result of a lack of effort.

This feeling of inferiority extended beyond strictly academic things–the dreaded extracurriculars. My close friends had their own successful nonprofits and played sports at the highest level (while simultaneously killing it in class) meanwhile I wasn’t really spectacular enough at anything. That’s not to say that I didn’t do things, but I never saw them as comparable. I wrestled with this doubt many times, and I would ask myself, is it worth it? What am I gaining here?

I chose to evaluate my situation as if I were on a sports team (which is hilarious because I don’t do sports). I asked myself, would I rather be one of the best in a mediocre team or one of the worst in a really good team. To me the answer was, and still is, the latter, mainly because I am of the thinking that I would rather strive to reach the level of my peers as opposed to lower myself down to it. And so I stayed at Parker with the idea that the struggles that I faced, although at times incredibly overwhelming (I often have flashbacks to the many times I cried in front of Mrs. Falcone out of sheer frustration of not understanding the material no matter how much I studied), would be worth it in the end.

I chose to sacrifice a bit of my soul in order to receive a good education–one which I definitely did receive and value very much. One that would provide me with the proper tools to succeed in college (which it has, so far). But now I’m at NYU, and this Parker mentality has stuck with me–both the good and bad aspects (a.k.a., the constant dilemma of willingly and happily pushing myself to do better but not knowing if what I am doing is or will ever be good enough). As an English major, one feels the need to justify their choice–this is part of a much longer conversation and so I will not go into it–and so I’ve chosen to double major. Seeing as I live in NYC–a city with endless opportunities–I felt inclined to find a job, which, although unrelated to my future potential career does provide experience, I suppose. I could say that this “ambition” simply stems from myself, but I don’t believe that. I also don’t believe that I could or would characterize this as a result of my ambition because these choices came about from bouts of anxiety and a need for validation.

Even though I am no longer in the academically-driven bubble that was Parker, even though I have come to meet people that simply do not care about their education (much to my naive astonishment)–I’m still plagued by this Parker-induced sentiment of not doing enough and of not being enough, and while I don’t have an answer by any means, I do wonder when I’ll allow myself to breathe a bit or when the Parker mentality will finally take a backseat….

Postscript–
I'm not sure that I’m in a position to give any substantial advice, but I do have just one suggestion to those who feel or have felt a similar way: don’t bottle it up because you feel like there isn’t someone willing to listen without minimizing your feelings.

Instead, I propose another outlet: writing about it. Admittedly, it took me too long to do this, but writing about it helped validate my frustration and put it into perspective. Maybe verbalizing your feelings is intimidating, as it sometimes means admitting things that you’ve been ignoring, but I think it’s the first step to allowing yourself to grow.