Motivated By Shame

Yesterday, I said that I was hesitant to share some of my goals. At first, I thought perhaps it was a fear of failure, but that's not quite it. Not quite. 

The more I thought about what it is that makes sharing my goals feel so burdensome in my soul, the more I came back to two things: 

Motivation and shame. 

The things that I'm doing, I'm doing because they are meaningful to me. Because accomplishing these things helps me to understand something better about myself, to grow in a way that I want to grow, to demonstrate a strength I wasn't sure that I had. I am doing these things because of what my soul gains from having done them, which is often immeasurable and sometimes seems silly, but it is ingrained in my bones in a way that maybe Jeremiah understands best. These things are meaningful to me. 

If I share those goals before their time, before I'm ready, while I'm still putting in the discipline and work to accomplish them, all of a sudden, a second pressure is introduced. 

It's the pressure of having to succeed. 

It's the pressure of knowing that the world is now watching. That someone out there, maybe many someones, is judging my progress. That someone may be waiting on me to fail. That if I do fail, everyone will have a theory as to why. The world will be watching, and if it doesn't work out, I become the scapegoat in my own life - my body is too frail, my will too weak, my discipline lacking, my eyes set on the wrong thing. 

If the world is watching and I don't meet my goal, all of a sudden, not only have I failed, but I am a failure. 

(That's just the way the world judges.) 

And as I sit around and think about the things I'm working toward, I realize that if I keep pushing myself toward them because of the watching world, I am living in fear of failure, rather than excitement about accomplishment. I am living not to win, but to not lose. I am motivated not by all of the good, glorious, sacred, holy things that set me on this path in the first place, but by shame. 

Real or perceived, explained or unexplained, understood or misunderstood, I am working toward my goals now because I don't want those who know about them to ever have reason to think of me as a failure. 

That's not how I want to live. That's not the story I'm writing. 

I know that in my own heart, I'm not afraid to fail. But I don't want to become a failure. I know that a watching world puts its own interpretations on everything and that no amount of my insistence, my persistence, my explanations, my rationales, my whatever will ever convince this world of anything it doesn't already think about me. I know that if the world is watching and I fail, I will spend the rest of my life trying to justify myself, trying to justify this moment, when I know - though the world may torment me into forgetting - that when this whole thing started? It was supposed to be beautiful. 

That's what shame does. It takes away the beautiful. 

That's why I'm hesitant to share my goals before their time. Because I want to keep them beautiful. I want to keep them motivated by the things in my heart that called me to pursue them in the first place. I want pursuing them to make me feel stronger, lighter, better...not heavier. Not weighted down by anything, but free to go after them. 

So I don't always share all my goals. Not too early, anyway.