Mythical Overcoming

Overcoming

Looking at the title, I can appreciate you may be expecting a somewhat downbeat or defeated article. My hope is that in exploring the subject, quite the opposite can be true.

In our current climate of information saturation, I am witnessing a constant stream of narratives from the broadest array of identities and their specific struggles. Across online profiles, accounts, and publications, I can hear people all over the world discussing their challenges and hardships. From individual accounts of economic, social, and mental hardship to collective stances of resistance and solidarity against systemic injustice, I’d argue that overcoming is a desire alive and well, shared by many millions.

Yet I’m left thinking, what is the purpose of this exactly? What are people getting from this narrativizing and sharing? Only those sharing can answer this question; as an observer, I’m left supposing. My foremost thought is whether sharing and publicizing such struggles actually aids in overcoming them. 

Is overcoming just a desire or a myth?

Overcoming as a term says to me, or implies, that the challenge is over, the declaration that the struggle has ended successfully. This end, however, isn’t my experience. I’m straight, white, and a man, and I have no qualms staring down the barrel of my significant privilege. I have no representative duty or value, neither do I face any systemic oppression.

My relationship with overcoming has been purely internal: dealing with matters of well-being and mental health. The overcoming of demons and one’s inner world in my experience is a day-at-a-time process. Overcoming in this sense is not a matter of reaching a plateau or seeing greater societal change, rather it’s been about evolving as I’ve grown; it’s been an ongoing investment in myself for a better quality of life. I’ve also found that my perspective on the quality of my life has changed over the years.

If you were to ask 21-year-old me what quality of life looks like, I don’t doubt you’d receive a rather grandiose and imaginative response. As a drama school graduate with little sense of his place in the world, I’m sure quality of life for that young man meant stardom, LA, a big house, and the never-ending waterfall of adulation. If you ask me now what a better quality of life looks like, it means being present, being on top of my responsibilities, having a balance in my life, and feeling decent-to-good on a consistent and regular basis.

I feel the need to be careful with my commentary given my social identity. I am not someone who has been raised witnessing the discrimination and oppression of loved ones or experiencing it myself. Not for a second do I feel I can remotely comment on what overcoming means for people living experiences I’ve never known myself.

Time is teaching me that the “myth” of overcoming reflects how we define it. I know for a fact that 21-year-old me would be mildly depressed looking at my life now. Conversely, I know now that the younger version of me had something of a loose grasp on reality, albeit a determined and adventurous attitude towards it. I’m reminded of the Buddhist tenet, “The root of all suffering is desire.” 

A new relationship with the idea of overcoming

Perhaps I feel I’ve overcome more now because the goals and desires I previously held have faded as anything reachable.

I’m not for a moment saying anyone shouldn’t feel that they can have desires. Neither do I seek to tell anyone to wait for the results of your labor, your targets. I can only say that in my experience, overcoming appears to be a life’s work. The only way overcoming something becomes a myth for me is setting up timelines and results in my head uninformed by any external reality. Overcoming is no myth, but it is a process that takes time. I need to go a day at a time and perhaps only look back every six months or so, if not longer.

It would be my contention that we are all overcoming something and becoming more. 

That maybe, just maybe, looking back over time, be it in one lifetime or across the generations that follow us, we’ll see our story of overcoming was no myth at all.