Gold Stars and Losing Streaks

This week marks 26 weeks of consistent writing, a streak that is exactly half a year long. Except it doesn’t.

Somehow, between weeks 24 and 26, I missed a deadline or something because even though I published a piece every week- whether it was a poem, an essay, a chapter from my book, or just a little blurb- I got an email saying congratulations on your ONE WEEK STREAK.

I’M SORRY. WHAT?!

I could’ve died right there on my kitchen floor; in the very spot I opened the email. The goal I set- to publish something every week for a year- poof! Just gone with the wind. I would love to tell you I shook it off and went on with my day, not letting a glitch or an error in time zones or whatever happened get me down. I would love to tell you I let it go, because I know in my mind that I didn’t miss a week, and that when I got an email reminding me that I had two days left to post before losing my streak, that I made sure to post within those two days. So, I don’t know what went wrong, and I’d love to tell you I have moved on from this, but I got that email saying congratulations on starting my streak five days ago and I am sitting here, writing about it because in fact, I have not moved on. I cried that day, I cried yesterday, and maybe even a little bit today. I cried out of frustration, disappointment, and because that means if I am going to win at Substack, I have to start all over again and it is a lot of pressure. I WAS IN THE TOP 13 % PERCENT OF ALL WRITERS ON THE PLATFORM. Only a few more weeks, and I would have been an A student.

So, a few things about me. I am very competitive. With others, and myself. I am Monica Gellar. My team never loses. I am also the oldest child in the household in which I grew up, so I have a lot of those only child perfectionist tendencies. I also, at 43 years old, still need an embarrassing amount of acknowledgement, accolades, and “good jobs!” I need approval like I need air. This need is so deeply engrained in my personality that I do not know how to separate myself from it. I can also be pretty hard on myself when I don’t measure up to some invisible standard that I’ve set for myself.

Take college, for example. My first semester at San Francisco State, I just showed up. I did my work, went to class, but I didn’t put much thought into any of it. I got good grades (good grades have always come naturally easy to me, which makes it hard when things don’t come naturally, which is another topic altogether.) So, after my first semester, when I got a notice in the mail that I had made the Dean’s List without trying, or even meaning to because I didn’t know that it existed, the bar had been set. From that point on, I had to make Dean’s List every semester. After a few more semesters, I learned about graduating with honors. I ran the numbers and decided that Dean’s List every semester wasn’t good enough, I had to graduate with honors. If I didn’t graduate with honors, I wasn’t going to walk at graduation. And in order to graduate with honors, I had to take a few extra classes in order to boost my GPA. This is how my brain works, and I don’t know why I am like this, but the same principle applied to my stupid Substack streak.

I didn’t know it was a goal to be had, but once I got that first email 26 weeks ago, I knew I’d have to go to a year and make it into the top whatever percent of writers. I had a whole post prepped in my mind to celebrate my half-year accomplishment (one thing I’ve learned as a writer is that no one is going to celebrate you, so you need to do it yourself- more on that later.) And I diligently posted, even if it was just a few words, a poem, anything to keep that streak alive. And it’s gone. Even if it’s not, it is. Next week I will get a stupid little email telling me good job on posting for two weeks in a row, and I will cringe. I will cringe because it will be 27 weeks, but my stats won’t show that. I will get that little email saying to “keep going!” and I will be in like, the bottom 90th percentile of writers and I will have to claw my way up to the top again, taking time on vacations to write, or late at night, or early morning, to get to the place I’ve already been.

You might be thinking, reach out to Substack, see if they can fix it! Well, joke’s on me because I did that already and they can’t. So, buckle in, while I now have to post every week for 18 months instead of twelve, so I can get that email that no one else will see that I posted every week for a whole ass year straight. I want to see what that email looks like. I want to share that accomplishment. Those emails, those milestones, were about the only thing I post on social media anymore, and I’m sad starting over. I worked so hard, and the frustration lies in knowing that I didn’t even miss a week, I just missed a timestamp. Maybe just by a few minutes. I don’t know how their software works, so I can’t be sure. All I know is that I got an email reminding me to post within two days so that I didn’t lose my streak, and so I did. And I don’t know what happened.

So here I am, on week two, knowing that its not. Knowing how hard I worked and that I guess I only have myself to blame for waiting until the last minute to post something. I guess there is a lesson here somewhere. Probably several. There are also many present themes here that I regularly discuss with my therapist and will bring up in my next visit so she can remind me all the good things that I do and that I didn’t fail, and that I’m not, in fact, a failure in general. She will be gentle with me and caring and patient and it will be nice, and I will still probably be frustrated with myself. The funny thing is, literally no one else would know about my lapse if I wasn’t sitting here writing about it. No one cares. No one else thinks I’m a failure because my streak is over as far as Substack is concerned. And the truth is, I don’t particularly care what other people think either. Because this streak wasn’t for anyone else- it was for me, it was for that moment that I wrote every week for an entire year without giving up and opened that email that said, you did it. I feel like it will look different than the others because it will be an entire year.

So, I guess, here we go again. My initial reaction was to throw it all to the wolves. To just go back to writing when I had some spare time, instead of making time for it. But I’m going to keep going. Because for all the good and the bad reasons, I need that stupid gold star next to my name that says I did a good job, because I guess sometimes in this life, no one else will give you one. That’s not anyone else’s fault; people aren’t mind readers, for starters. Not everyone knows the things I need a gold star for and the things I don’t, so I can’t expect it from others- it wouldn’t be fair. Secondly, by the time most people are in their mid-40’s, I think they just don’t need the approval from others the same way they did as when they were 9. Or maybe they do, I don’t know. Maybe we are all just a bunch of giant kids that need gold stars and that is why we are all in therapy or have anxiety or drink or whatever, because all we need is someone to recognize our efforts and say here and give us a little laminated award for our efforts or a gold star next to our names.

So, I’m going to get a gold star, it’s just going to take me way longer than I thought, but hot damn when that day comes… in 50 more weeks. And, for whatever accomplishment you’re working on, or just completed, or are struggling with- here is a gold star for you, just in case you need it.