Do I Have to Make Progress?

My therapist recently asked if I felt like I was making “progress.” She inadvertently hit a hot-button ex-Mormon issue. The Mormon church preaches a lot about “eternal progress,” the path by which we mere mortals become gods ourselves (however much the church insists this isn’t taught anymore, it absolutely 100% is and all Mormons know it). Eternal progress is the way that a million small steps toward becoming a better person eventually achieve the goal of perfection. For some Mormons, this may sound like a fantastic idea. God knows I liked it for a very long time. But it comes with some very negative side-effects. Like eternal anxiety and shame.

Let me explain.

I am a very achievement-oriented person. I don’t know if I just came this way or if this is the tortured result of growing up with a father who obsessively promoted academic excellence (he was at every single tiny academic award ceremony I ever got a certificate in and yet came to not a single swim meet during the three years I competed for the high school team). I find it easy to focus obsessively on clear goals with daily measurable steps toward an end result. This is why I love to study for multiple choice tests and why metrics in the workplace are extremely motivating to me.

I was a very good Mormon checklist maker and achiever. I was one of those horrible Mormons who was constantly listening to the church leaders giving new lists of rules, and I was so pleased with myself because I could achieve almost all of them. I thought that this was going to get me some kind of grand reward. It didn’t. When my daughter died twenty years ago, I realized that there’s no pass that gets you through hard stuff. If God exists or not, my doing all the things did not save my daughter or my marriage. I was pretty angry about this because I really did think that I was creating a kind of shield of protection through my excessive obedience.

I listened to a lot of other Mormons insist that God had chosen to take my daughter to get me to work harder and progress faster toward perfection. I could not imagine any way that I could work harder or achieve progress faster. I was at my absolute maximum. Mormonism has a tricky relationship with the idea of grace “after all we can do.” Which really means there’s no stepping off the hamster wheel of perfection. You can never be sure what God might consider “all you can do,” so you better keep running and running so it’s not your fault. Only it will always be your fault because there’s no limit to what level of perfection God might demand that you perform on your own.

It's been a long time since I believed in this kind of God, but apparently not long enough that my therapist could ask a question like this without triggering a visceral response from me.

No, I’m not making progress and I’m trying very, very hard to stop thinking of myself as a work-in-progress in this way, indeed not even to think of myself as a list of things that need to be worked on and that I check-list off as I get better at each of them. I refuse now to see myself as unworthy by virtue of some thing I have not achieved or imbedded deeply enough.

So how to talk to a therapist about what makes therapy useful to me?

I explained to the therapist that I tend to use the word “practice” rather than progress. I like it because it implies that there isn’t an end, a perfect state that I’m trying to achieve. I’m just practicing lessons. All of life is a bunch of situations that occur in which I am practicing the tools that I am learning to use. Nothing is the final test. There is no end-day in which God will judge me good enough.

I tried to give my therapist the example of my triathlon career to explain. I spent the first few years training to compete at the highest level. The next few years I was able to eke out a few minutes here and there in certain races I knew well, so that I continued to improve my times. Then there were a couple of years of stasis. And then the years where I started to lose seconds, then minutes, and now an hour or so on my best times. There is no way in which I can continue to progress toward faster times at my age. I’m just going to show up at races and see how far I’ve slid since the last race. And try to be happy with this. Because I don’t have to prove my worthiness as a human being through competition anymore.

Yes, I know this isn’t what my therapist means when she asks about “progress,” but I can’t help but hear it anyway. So I use different language around the idea so that my brain thinks about this whole process differently. Am I becoming a better human? No. Am I smarter than I used to be? Definitely not. Am I wiser? Debatable. My brain is less agile, less quick to learn, and I find it very frustrating. Are there discrete tasks I am better at than I was at twenty? Yes, but I’m not at all sure if they are meaningful.

The point is that this is allowed. I am allowed to deteriorate in the former never-ending quest toward perfection. I can be slower both academically and at my races. I can learn to be kind to myself about my lack of perfection. Is that progress? I suppose it’s a kind of progress, but it’s a bit like the year in which I made a goal to make no goals, and unfortunately failed even in that one goal.