I painted a dressing table during the first Coronavirus lockdown. For what it’s worth, I painted a chest of drawers too, but I’ll try and refrain from bragging. The thing is for me, painting furniture is a big deal (well, a bigger deal than for many, I’m sure). I’m hilariously un-arty and not at all comfortable when armed with a paintbrush. And yes, there are paint chips on both from when we moved house that I’m acutely aware will not be sorted for a while… or ever. But the point is, I painted this furniture when furloughed from my job in the first lockdown - that one back in March 2020 when baking banana bread and drinking wine were the standard Tuesday (ahem, Saturday) night activities.
I can laugh about it now, smugly placing an ornamental box over the dodgy craftsmanship so people are none the wiser to the paint chips scattered below. Because now, I no longer have to paint furniture to feel that my day is fulfilled. Things are back to normal in that regard; I’m working, so I have both a purpose and something for people to ask me about that prompts a socially acceptable answer. Far more validated than sanding down some drawers (yes, I even did the prep too).
However, despite feeling horrendously unimpressive in comparison to other people pursuing pretty much any other avenue, I can’t help feeling that lockdown highlighted the importance of not just taking the small wins, but congratulating ourselves for them. As crazy as it felt to cheer ourselves on for doing a clothes wash, it made us feel something. It’s important to take the small wins for more than they may seem to others, and value them for what they bring. Because they often aren’t ‘small’ in the way we perceive them to be.
It’s recently dawned on me how powerfully tall this phenomenon stands within the centre of our lives, our happiness, our being. Our successes are ours to keep, but there’s always someone doing more. Someone hears about what we’ve been doing, and concurrently we’re being one-upped by someone doing something better. When we’re online, we crave that rush from someone else double-tapping their screen to send through a virtual heart, supposedly symbolising how much they like (or love) what we’re about but more inherently feeling like a half-arsed pat on the back that lasts all of three seconds.
It's common to seek validation from others. A faceless encouragement that assures us what we’re doing is not necessarily good, but merely being seen and recognised. I recall being a teenager in secondary school, when this wasn’t so centered around what I was achieving, but solely focussed on my status marked by the number of Facebook friends shown alongside my photo. The higher the number, the greater the amount of peers to make me feel ‘good’. And of course, we all know this meant the potential number of likes on a photo awkwardly taken through a somewhat distorted, out of focus, webcam would soar. And, I now see sadly, this would bring a sense of gratification for who I was.
I find it bizarre to comprehend how this same sensation has never dampened, it’s just changed tack. Nowadays, I see my peers (and a selection of influencers I ominously follow - because, yes, I want to know what they are doing on a Sunday morning while I’m ashamedly still in bed) succeeding with an array of personal and professional accomplishments. And seeing those can either make me feel genuinely happy for them or worryingly sad about myself; actually, it’s mostly a mixture of the two, but it depends on the day.
It can sometimes be the smallest thing: seeing that someone else is out for a morning run, a brunch, attending an event, reading a book, watching a programme - anything that I’m not doing at that moment, because I’m sitting cross-legged scrolling into the abyss. In the space of eight seconds I’ve established that someone is engaged, someone is shopping with a friend and someone else is out for a walk. Big and small achievements that are different, and therefore greater, than what I’m doing.
The more successful someone is, the more seen they are. So of course, the most seen person becomes the most successful, the most talked about, the most known. It’s a ruthless cycle that takes no prisoners. And I can’t help feeling that we so often blur our own successes out to allow room for other peoples’ to take pride of place in our own lives.
In the wake of Molly Mae’s infamous interview on Stephen Bartlett’s podcast ‘The diary of a CEO’, I’m so incredibly conscious of how people may view their own successes. Being told that we all have the same 24 hours every day to make our lives exceptional can make the most conscientious person feel pretty small. Many are accustomed to having two figures in their bank balance while payday feels a million miles away (and that’s incredible luck compared to so many across the world). It pales in comparison to what Molly has. For the most part, it’s OK that this difference between us and Molly is there, because it’s nothing new. But what isn’t fine is the fallout of people now feeling that there’s a reason this stark contrast exists, that there’s a reason their life is so obviously different to hers. A reason they may now blame on themselves as something that’s avoidable.
There’s not one scale capable of measuring everyone’s individual achievements, comparing them all for everyone to see. The scale would be different for everyone. On that day back in 2020, me painting some furniture would be the same level as Molly Mae breaking past 6 million Instagram followers today. As Ross Geller so eloquently said in that Friends quiz, ‘It’s all relative’.
But no matter how unpretentious we may be, it feels good to indulge people in something we’ve done. Something they haven’t done - it’s our thing. Whether it’s a piece of painted furniture, a job promotion with a hefty pay rise or a two-day-late hair wash. Inevitably, they'll swiftly become old news and a wave of pressure will come along ready to wrangle the next success out from somewhere.