Sometimes ‘tough love’ is just a steaming pile of what spews out of assholes. It’s sold as love, it may even look like love, all dressed up in worry and cautionary tales, but the reality is that it’s nothing more than the hope that you maintain mediocrity.
That you continue to show up for girl’s night with a bottle of white wine and low carb finger foods. That you make sure to drink three beers and two tequilas on Fridays to blur the edges of a job you hate. And that you never bump into the rough, doubt heavy patches who are frequent diners at ‘Chasing Dreams’ at the cost of being their cache of upbeat, eternal and instant availability.
It’s August 2013 and my then best friend is breaking my heart.
I’ve just told him that I’m going to relocate to Thailand in a few months to try and write something that’s worth something and he’s looked me right in the eye and told me that I’m not going to go anywhere, that I’m not going to do anything and that after he has travelled to India, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, I will be right where he left me.
Though he is as acquainted with my dreams as well as he is with my demons, he verbally slaps me through the face and later calls it “tough love”.
According to him, a junior lawyer at Ashersons Attorneys and every parent who has ever discouraged their artist, writer, dancer or singer sons and daughters, the harsh words, the utter abandonment and the devastating lack of encouragement is all a clever ruse of reverse psychology which is meant to motivate.
And I suppose it does.
So many of us leave demoralising conversations about our hopes for our future, dashing tears and clenching fists while trying to quell the sinking feeling in our soul thinking “I’ll show them.” And we work harder than ever to prove them wrong.
We gain motivation but what we lose is joy.
Suddenly, that thing that we have sacrificed everything to pursue becomes about the naysayers and every brushstroke, every word and every melody is haunted by the spectre of the people who have told us we’ll never make it hovering nearby.
Alternately motivating us and making us miserable.
Instead of pursuing happiness, we start running from an “I told you so” and often that bitterness seeps into our work which is no longer what it was when we were free. From the knowing glances, from the sad, patronising little shakes of the head and the fear of the day when we have given up and the tough lovers take us in their arms… while quietly smirking behind our backs.
Though it can be hurtful, discouraging and make you doubt what you feel is the reason you’ve been put on Earth, the most devastating thing about tough love is that it makes your dreams about someone else and allows them to win. Whether you do or not.
If you succeed they claim they believed in you all along and that their years of telling you that you’ll never amount to anything was just tough love meant to spur you on. And if you lose then they’ll be there with open arms, a low tier job offer and a vivid recollection of how they warned you against this path 20 years ago.
The good thing is that it doesn’t have to be this way.
In this life you’re going to be told what you can’t do a thousand times over and once more for good measure.
You’re going to be torn apart by other people’s fears, their own failures and the bitterness they hope to half by sharing it with you. But through it all, you will have that thing that scares them.
That thing that burns in you by day and whispers to you at night saying:
“This is what you are here for. Get up. Go on.”
Believe in that, believe in yourself and forget what people who don’t believe in you have to say about your dreams. Anything less gives scornful spectators power over your mind, your art and your future for the cost of comments, candour and their own cowardice which is far more than they deserve.
And so much less than you do.
