Project Mediocrity
On Enneagram Types, Racialized Excellence, and the Hollow Pursuit of Perfection
H e l l o from the other side of my master’s thesis defense! Did you know that after you successfully defend, your thesis committee reveals the secret that M.A. actually stands for “Master-ial Girl?” There are a tonnnn of emotions that come with my newfound title, but above all there is immense gratitude. Like many others, I’ve had an ever-evolving love-hate relationship with my master’s program/degree, but right now I’m sitting with a nice mixture of pride, nostalgia, and quiet sadness as I sift through all that I’ve gained—and now subsequently have to part with—over the past two years. I’ll miss leading my ever-curious students in feminist conversation and the weird limbo of psuedo-adulthood that grad school often feels like. I’ll miss the shared office where my colleagues (who are actually secretly just my friends) and I can’t ever seem to get anything done. I’ll miss the panic-stress of lesson planning every week and maybe even all of the scholarly reading I’ve had to do in a time crunch. I’ll definitely miss my advisor, my fave supervisors, and everyone who’s cheered me on over the past four semesters to reach all my academia and non-academia related goals and dreams.
THE WEEK IN GRATITUDE
Olivia Rodrigo: Earlier this month, Elaine and I made the Tuesday night trek to Milwaukee to see no other than the Miss Olivia Rodrigo. Now, dear reader, the word “see” is a relative one here. While we did attend the concert at which the famed “driver’s license” star sang, whether or not we actually saw her figure with our own eyeballs is a bit more debatable. Despite the venue having the lowest stage in concert history and the worst acoustics possible, it was still fun to be 17 for the night, in the presence of a goddess. And yes, I did cry like a bitch baby to “driver’s license” and many, many more songs.
A Visit with Friends: Apparently, the promo I’m doing for Madison, WI on social media is fairing pretty well since I have successfully convinced friend after friend to visit and see what this Lake Life is all about. Last week, two of my dearest high school friends came to visit me from different parts of the East Coast! The weather blessed us with a high 70s day so they were able to enjoy the lakes from every angle, drink Spotted Cow, and have a few bites of our state delicacy, the cheese curd.
National Independent Bookstore Day was a treat and a half. My dear cohort and I decided to make a weekend getaway out of the nerd holiday and spent last Saturday frolicking around Chicago in the rain, bookstore hopping. I spent way too much on books (in my defense, many of them were used and under $5), but being able to escape the stress of finals (and theses!) in good company was well worth the splurge.
A NOTE ON CURRENT EVENTS
On May 2, 2022, Politico published a leaked draft opinion from the Supreme Court that will effectively overturn the 1973 ruling of Roe v. Wade, which grants people the right to safe abortions in the US. This immense assault on reproductive rights will disproportionately affect poor Black and brown women and will put many more people’s autonomy and lives in jeopardy. Our nation has a dark history of both forced pregnancy and forced sterilization (both of which have roots in white supremacy and eugenics) and the reversal of this law, should it come into effect, will have far-reaching and perhaps unprecedented effects. In the wake of Roe’s reversal, many U.S. states will either enforce trigger laws or fall back on pre-Roe laws that will ultimately ban abortion and criminalize those seeking them (and those involved in this process). States will also have the freedom to create laws that put further restrictions on other reproductive health related services (e.g. access to contraception) using the new ruling Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health as its basis.
While Planned Parenthood has become a well known resource for those seeking reproductive health services (which includes access to safe abortions), this national organization is well funded by its many monthly and one-time donors. For those interested in showing monetary support for reproductive justice in response to the draft leak (and in general), the National Network of Abortion Funds is a good place to locate your local abortion funds which will benefit more directly from donations at this time. For those in the Midwest, the Midwest Access Coalition (located in Chicago, IL) provides funds to those needing to travel outside of their city or state to make it to their appointments, with the goal of increasingly accessibility to abortion.
POEM OF THE WEEK
I’ve been writing poems that are a bit longer than I’m used to lately—poems that last longer than a page have always been a challenge for me but over the past week, the words just seem to keep pouring. I’ve been writing about relationships of all kinds these days, pushing the convention of love poetry to expand to excitement, bondedness, and heartache that isn’t solely romantic. “If By You You Mean We” by Amy Woolard has been knocking around in my head lately, mostly because of its fine, private details, its fixation on consumption, and its quiet devotion. The line “…The way it happened, I was my own / Witness. When we was / Together / everything was so grand,” in particular, has me thinking about testimony and its intersections with writing and love.
Before you read this week’s essay, listen to “Mirrorball” from Taylor Swift’s album folklore. In many ways, it encapsulates all of the things that I stumble over and through in this piece, a distillation of all the fears and anxieties that come with being raised to believe that your self worth is rooted solely in your ability to excel and be perfect.
It’s almost ironic to be publishing this piece after having just successfully defended my master’s thesis—while I am immensely proud of the final product of my project, I don’t know that I liked who I became in the process of writing it: obsessive, relentless, and unforgiving to myself. While I had enough self awareness to know that I was subjecting myself to unreasonably high standards, I couldn’t do anything about it, was too trapped within its confines to find my way out. In reflecting on the personal, relational, racial, and gendered influences of these pressures, I’ve given myself solid ground on which to envision the upcoming chapter in my life and rethink how I see myself and how I expend my energy.
PROJECT MEDIOCRITY: On Enneagram Types, Racialized Excellence, and the Hollow Pursuit of Perfection
“Rest and be kind, you don’t have to prove anything.” —Jack Kerouac
One afternoon in the second grade, the tiny desks that were usually clustered into tables were broken into columns so that my classmates and I could participate in the grueling ritual of the New York State Test. A star pupil at seven, I was already familiar with the appeal of obedience, both deathly afraid of authority and unable to imagine a world unruled by it. A diligent test taker even then, I worked my way through the pale grey booklet, steadily gaining momentum with every instruction to “TURN THE PAGE,” barely taking a moment to rest until I reached the one that commanded that I “STOP,” the four-letter word enclosed in a traffic sign. For a moment, I obeyed, placing my number two pencil in its rightful ridge, my feet swinging beneath the desk in triumph.
For a moment, there was calm. Relief. I had done what I was asked and done it well. But then, without much notice, I was overcome with an intense panic—that I hadn’t checked over my answers thoroughly enough, that maybe I had skipped a page and missed an entire section. I raised my hand and meekly asked my teacher if I could go back and re-check my answers, you know, just in case—a big no-no for standardized tests that she unsurprisingly abided by. Shocked by her rejection and the imagined consequences of my alleged carelessness, I burst into tears. My teacher towered over me, perplexed by my sudden and seemingly misplaced outburst of emotion: It was only a practice test, after all.
*
The desire to be perfect has followed me everywhere I go, a needy younger sibling whose nagging had no foreseeable end, always tugging at my sleeve and demanding that they be attended to. As an enneagram three, this need to embody perfection is textbook, to be expected. At our best, those of us who fall into this personality category shine brightly and contribute meaningfully to our projects and communities. Nicknamed “The Achiever,” we are always elbow-deep in our various endeavors, all of which we balance perfectly. But at our worse, being able to help others with their goals is only a nice, coincidental byproduct of our relentless pursuit of greatness.
The unhealthy manifestations of enneagram three’s make it so the thing we are really after is others’ approval, their praise. The gratification that might come with helping to bring about others’ success pales in comparison to what we’re actually after: an externally-imposed sense of self worth, one that, while fragile and wavering, is strong enough to propel us towards our next senseless goal. We want to be great for the sake of being great, a goal whose underlying belief is the deep-seated insecurity that underneath it all, we are not inherently worthy—rather, our worth rests solely on our ability to achieve, to perform, to excel.
*
Though it might sound like a not-so-humble brag to say that I’m good at everything that I do, this is because I’ve grown up with no other option. Everything that I’ve pursued, whether or not by my own will, has been one that I’ve had to excel in whether I liked it or not. For more than a decade of my young life, from ages 6 to 17, I spent every night at the piano practicing each piece ten times so that I would be prepared for my weekly lesson that coming Friday. Each turn was marked by a pencil that I moved from one side of the music desk to the other every time I’d finish the piece, only to play it again. Over the years, there were countless times where I’d fall asleep on the uncomfortable wooden bench, the brown leather beginning to pool with drool while the pinks and purples of dusk slipped into pitch black.
Despite the excellence and acuity that I achieved in piano over time, my muscles molding into pieces that I could play from memory or with my eyes closed, I never loved the art of it—in all honesty, I never got the chance to. Piano was something I did because it was a way to win my mother’s affection, her praise. It’s only been in recent years that I’ve found myself lingering at the piano in our living room whenever I’m home, wondering what it would be like if playing was actually an extension of my self expression rather than a way to further prove myself.
The catch to perfection is that I’ve very rarely pursued anything that I might even remotely be bad at. Aside from the one time I tagged along with my neighbors to their tennis lessons at age 5 (which is hearsay at this point, because I blacked out the memory probably from being so bad at it), I’ve never tried anything that does not fit into the particular skillsets that I’ve developed over the years, all of them demanding detail orientation and critical thought, my hand-eye coordination and general athleticism severely lacking as a result. The fear of failure has overpowered any budding flame of curiosity that might’ve pushed me towards something new, something out of my comfort zone. To be out of control would mean the loss of the guarantee of ultimate success and subsequent praise, a gamble I could never quite convince myself was worth it.
*
Within the western school system, the script for enneagram three’s is an easy one to follow. Study hard. Get good grades. Collect honors and awards. Join clubs. Become a leader. Steer those working under you in the right direction as to accomplish great things. Become larger than life, but only in a way that you can still control. Relish in the praise. As a daughter of Asian immigrants, the road to inevitable success is even more clear, even more narrow: Pursue medicine. Become a doctor. Make lots and lots of money—the kind of wealth that can be easily displayed by a nice home or a fancy car. Happiness is the nice, coincidental byproduct. Financial stability is forever.
Even though I did well in my biology classes, the pull of literature and writing was too strong to avoid, even with all the crap that humanities majors get for pursuing “useless” degrees. Knowing that I was jeopardizing the model minority status that I had spent my whole life trying to maintain with this “faulty” educational choice, I still pursued an English degree anyway, and still strived for perfection in this uncharted territory. Because the person I was becoming wasn’t supposed to exist—the Asian American student excelling at anything other than medicine—I grasped at any and every avenue that could grant me even a modicum of success, wholly believing that in order to simply be, I had to be the best. I climbed myself up every writing-related ladder I could find (and took many, many detours along the way), an endless and directionless pursuit that I secretly hoped would tell me who I could or should be, which crumbs I needed to follow to bring me down the one beloved yellow brick road of praise.
*
After the fruitless soul searching of my undergraduate years, my first job out of college granted me the opportunity to move back to Europe and work at the same university where I studied abroad. To onlookers, it was the dream, the Eat Pray Love moment that every American dreams of. In reality, it was far less glamorous. In the weeks and months following my job acceptance, every time I jumped through another bureaucratic hoop that brought me closer to attaining my work visa, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was a diversity hire, that I was granted the job because of my race rather than any demonstrable merit.
This anxiety about being a diversity hire was confirmed the moment I stepped foot in my new workplace: of the fourteen people who made up my cohort, I was one of two non-white people. Being the more outspoken of the two, I developed a target on my back in just a few short months, the mouthy brown girl they were now stuck with as a consequence of needing to fill their POC quota. The confirmation of my fears made it so that I functioned out of a place of uncritical gratitude, simply thankful to be there and constantly telling myself that they could just replace me with some other non-white person. Even when I did excel and receive praise from my supervisors, I would talk myself out of my own excellence, feeling at the mercy of the spot that I slowly started to believe was one I didn’t deserve.
These feelings of institutional indebtedness and dispensable labor coexisted delicately with the fact that I had embodied the model minority all my life. Telling myself that I was not granted this opportunity based on any desirable characteristics other than helping the institution appear racially diverse only confirmed the underlying anxiety for anyone who has ever been labeled a model minority: that no matter what you do, you will never be excellent enough. While being a diversity hire and a model minority seemingly reside on opposite sides of the racial performativity spectrum, they feed seamlessly into each other, working together to chip away at any sense of confidence or self that you might’ve had to begin with.
*
For people of color and women of color in particular, the consequences of occupying subordinate race and gender identities have long since dictated how we must conduct ourselves to be taken seriously in our respective fields. In her essay “Against Mediocrity” from her 1990 book Writing Against Race, Black feminist cultural critic bell hooks writes about how striving for excellence is a political act, especially for Black writers who are writing about race. She concludes the essay by saying: “Let us recognize, as Baldwin did, that we are living “in an age of revolution.” [...] If we want to be part of a revolution, if we want to resist the tyranny of mediocrity then we must see excellence—the striving for excellence in our reading and writing—as essential political resistance.”
While it is of course important to strive for excellence in order to break through the noise of mediocrity, I want to interrogate why this responsibility of excellence is some people’s burden to bear and not others’. As Ijeoma Oluo unflinchingly lays out in her book Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, mediocrity has been a gift bestowed upon white men—those who unfortunately yet predictably find themselves in positions of power and control. In the introduction of the book she writes:
By making whiteness and maleness their own reward, we disincentivize white men from working to earn their privileged status. If you are constantly assumed to be great just for being white and male, why would you struggle to make a real contribution? [...] Most women and people of color have to claw their way to any chance at success or power, have to work twice as hard as white men to prove themselves to be exceptional talents before we begin to entertain discussions of truly equal representation in our workplaces or government. Somehow, we don’t think white men should be required to shoulder any of the same burden for growth and struggle the rest of us are expected to work through in order to accomplish anything worthwhile.
Why is it, as hooks lays out, that Black writers must go above and beyond what is expected of them just for their points to be taken seriously, while white men who have accomplished little are unquestionably taken for their word? Why is it that the creative and intellectual work of people of color must always be tied to their racial identity and a larger pursuit of justice in order to be seen as legitimate? What happens then, to the works and spaces in which joy, triumph, and other forms of grief could otherwise be given life, if not eclipsed by this incessant need to excel in the one thing writers of color have been restrictively assigned? To constantly feel the need to be excellent, to feel indebted to those who have “graciously” given you opportunities (both despite and in spite of your race and gender), to not be able to find a sense of self worth divorced from the external parameters of others’ approval is not only a personal act of self-violence, but a systemic one.
*
As my graduate program comes to a close and I rejoin the legions of 9-5 workers, I find myself at a crossroads of whether or not I want to continue to carry this unbearable weight around in my new pursuits. These days, during my commute home, every time the bus ascends the sloped street leading up to the Capitol, I can’t help but think that I’m hurtling towards the rest of my life, the one where something must change before I let these pressures of perfection and performance eviscerate me, before they take away my inner joy.
While a desire to simply be ‘mediocre’ feels anti-ambitious and antithetical to who I am as a person, for me, this new pursuit is actually just a desire to be human. To try things and suck at them. To be measured by how good my heart is and not my performance. To write about things not because I have to prove myself to others, but because they are reflections of my soul. Rather than a vow towards stagnancy, my aspirations towards mediocrity are ones towards growth, towards messiness, towards living a fuller life.