Redefining Toxic Ideas of “Success”

Before I became a parent, my idea of “success” was in line with what most people seem to think it is. Going to university, getting a good career, having a good salary. It makes you successful right? And if you’ve raised a child who has a good career and a good salary, that makes you a successful parent, right?

That’s what I was raised to believe. I was told that if you were intelligent, you went to university. That was just what you did. So I went along with what I’d been told I should do. What I realised in retrospect what that I basically followed what I now realise was my narcissistic mother’s dream. She had spent her life regretting dropping out of her A-Levels after being offered a job, and so she wanted me to go to university, and live the life that she’d wanted for herself.

It was actually just under a year before I got pregnant with my daughter that I decided that this conventional idea of ‘success’ was just not true — not for me, anyway. I was studying for a degree in Law when I realised that I was not enjoying it, and that Law wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life.

It took a lot of soul searching before I came to the decision to drop out of university. This wasn’t an easy decision to make — I had been raised to believe that, by dropping out of university, I would be ‘wasting’ my ‘intelligence’ and ‘potential’, and…