Eff goals. They’re just lines on paper anyway.

The truth is, my goals have always failed me. Or, more likely, I failed them. Either way.

They just didn’t work out. 

I was once asked to draw my greatest fear. What came to my mind was a bar chart, something looking like a staircase, up and to the right on the page, past the edge, never-ending up into infinity.

One step, then another, then another… straight lines with perfect right angles and symmetry…onward, always onward.

When I showed it to the facilitator, she looked perplexed. I didn’t draw death or blindness or illness… nope, just a line.

And that line absolutely reflects everything I fear most in this life. That line represents goals. It represents the impossible, never-ending expectations of life… and how they grow over time. Just one goal after another, stairs on the never-ending staircase … up and up and up … waiting for me to…fail. Because I will fail.  There is no attainable top, no end to infinity… failure is inevitable.

Or so it has always felt.

Chasing impossible goals. And failure. Over and over. Repeatable until death. {And that goes a little like “UGH. FML.”}

And then when I fail, I will have to start all over.

And no, this isn’t some rag about my failings in life. I mean, let’s be honest, I have failed. {Yep, fallen completely on my face. Splat.} But really, this meandering is something quite the opposite. In fact, this is a testament to what happens when I throw out goals in search of something different, something less likely to fail {or fall over}, something that can… {ahem, maybe just maybe} grow and thrive.

Observing the relatively simplistic depiction, I chuckled at first – c’mon, it was bland, lame… someone asked me to draw my greatest fears and I drew a line?? {** facepalm}

But then I paused – wait! I realized, right there, staring me in the face was the answer to one of the most complex challenges of my existence. Blandly depicted in black and white – it became clear…I don’t have a fear problem. Yes, true, the assignment was about fear… but actually the whole “fear” thing is not about fear. Fear doesn’t keep me stuck or anxious or send me on various trails to nowhere – nope! It is not a fear problem. What I have – I have a “goal” problem of extreme proportions. Not that fear isn’t a thing; it’s just that, I realized, I am the one creating and perpetuating my own greatest fear. I am most afraid of failure – failure to live up to the constantly changing and growing laws of goals-dom.

It’s a dramatic story I tell myself.

And that is the magic… because while conceptually it is hard to untangle, I noticed that the goals’ problem is something that is entirely my own making – yep, designed and authored by yours truly. {Ok sure, partly with the input of external factors like social media, random other humans and expectations that never actually existed anywhere except in my head.}

I couldn’t believe it: My greatest fear lives inside me. {Maybe this is obvious to most of the world… I really don’t know.} And if that’s the case – that if my greatest fear is of my own making, then, I too can do something about it because no one and nothing else controls what happens along or in the middle of that damn bar chart.

In a yin yang, one side is black with a small white dot and the other side is white with a small black dot. Well, this goals’ conundrum felt like a damn yin yang. On one side, the majority of my thinking was like: eff goals. But then, upon this realization, that little white circle in the black felt like it was singing to me: you got this. {Goes like: hold up, there might be something curious happening here.}  And all I needed to do was dive deep down into the fear part, to let go of the fear. I needed to understand the paradox that is – why am I so afraid of goals? Why am I so afraid of failure? Why does the terrifying aspect of going after goals outweigh the excitement of achieving them? I figured that once I got to the bottom of these questions, perhaps then, I could flip the yin to the yang – the black to the white and voila…a whole new world of experiencing goals.

That all seemed simple, but certainly not easy, because like every other challenge in life {like, ever!}, this particular “fear/ goal problem” felt particularly sticky to unravel because just like what happens when I set and achieve goals… I was facing deep seated resistance and an “eff this –“ mentality. Not only towards goals themselves, but now also {and ironically} towards the effort of unraveling the fear around goals. That voice sounds a lot like: this is dumb, run away, don’t face the issue. Just keep marching on and avoiding whatever discomfort exists. This voice evil-ly also convinces me sometimes – nothing really matters anyway. And then, on rare occasions, and in extreme cases, that voice yells loudly, angrily: blow it all up. No one cares. Just start over.

That space feels entirely ick-worthy and uncomfortable. And there I was, with a goal problem. And a decision – run away {far far away} or do the opposite and sprint the eff towards that “uncomfortable” thing. It’s funny, but while I have these voices that sing validating hymns to my fear, I have also learned that when something feels difficult and yucky, the answer may just be to surrender and embrace the ick-fest. And that within whatever muddy muck consumes me, well there is sure to be some sort of flower that blooms. {They say there are all sorts of nutrients in mud.}

It's like that tree that grows in a dome; the one that grows under perfect, easy conditions – that just-right temperature, just enough water, just tranquil enough air. It is complete perfection, and comfort… until one day, at a certain height, the tree just falls over. Plop. Dead. Under perfect conditions. That little perfect tree succumbs. Just like that, without any adversity. It just simply collapses because it is not strong enough to keep growing. It hasn’t endured the needed stress to have the strength to just keep growing. And therein lies the answer – to the tree problem, as much as to the goals problem – it’s the discomfort that allows for growth – for the tree, the answer is the wind, hot and cold, the storms, the drought and flood; and outside of any catastrophic entire obliteration scenario, it is the hardship that allows for the tree to keep on growing. Otherwise, that little tree just withers and kerplunk. Done.

And so, for me, this little shrub growing in the wild is not so dissimilar to undertaking my obsessive-disdain for goals. While I used to take discomfort as a warning signal that something is very wrong, it suddenly seemed I needed to, instead, lean into the wind, to be like a sapling and start to take cues from the breadcrumbs this goals’ dilemma was gusting in my direction. And it also seemed, that just like the problem of uncovering what underlies my loathe of goals, I also understood that like the tree and my discomfort with getting to the bottom of the goals/ fear sitch – therein may also lie the key to unlocking what to do about goals going forward. {I mean, how could I even consider existing without goals in my life? A complete and total conundrum.}

Then it hit me – wham-o smack-o in the face – OH! A goal isn’t some – get there and that’s it – sort of destination. No! The goals themselves are merely conditions like the wind, like the storms. The goals are right angles on the pathway to just. keep. growing. Because if they were the destination to be arrived at, I would be like the little tree and simply – stop growing when I reach the goal. I would just… kerplunk.

According to the Oxford dictionary, a goal is “the object of a person's ambition or effort; an aim or desired result.” And that’s where we humans get it all wrong… in our humanness. I was taught exactly that – that the goal is the aim, the target. If I get to the goal, then the dialogue goes a little like: “Yep here you are - you crushed  it. You have arrived!” And that’s the crux of the whole damn greatest fear story, where the Achilles heel to the whole goal chasing paradox exists.

I was told a lie. The world around me, no one in particular, led me to believe that setting a goal and achieving it… would mean I arrived at some place, some place that IS a destination. But what I really needed to know was that it was only a stop along the way; a mere pit stop.

Which means that my goals have never actually failed me.

I failed them. I failed them because I expected more of them than what they are. I did to my goals what I thought they were doing to me. I expected them to give me the impossible. I expected my goals to bring me comfort and that “just-right” existence. I wanted them to be the destination.

But they could never be that because there is no real destination. Just stops. Just little right corners {ahem they really aren’t all that scary. They are actually pretty cute. Totally cute, right?}  And the staircase to never-ending expectations, well, maybe just maybe it doesn’t go on forever, and it just moves upward towards the next horizontal bar; chances to turn my line exactly 90 degrees. Chances to plant roots, to grow stronger, to sprout branches, to bud leaves and flowers…. The chance to exhale. And then… begin again.

So eff, goals. They are just lines on paper anyway.

Written by Courtney Sawyer

Art by Becca Williams

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