Success, Deconstructed
In December 2016, I sat in a Utah conference room with 40 other parents of teenagers and young adults. We were there because we had sent our children to a wilderness therapy program, and we were about to see them for the first time in several months. Our children were there because of depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, suicide attempts. We were strangers, but we recognized each other’s loneliness, anguish, and shame immediately. All of us were undone by our children’s struggles. Being in that room together felt like being held.
Although it was early December, our mailbox was already bursting with holiday cards bearing glad tidings. When it was my turn to introduce myself, I said I had been fantasizing about sending out our own radically honest holiday card. It would start with something like, “Dear friends and family, what a year it’s been!” Everyone laughed, and I thought, Yep, these are my people.
I didn’t send the card. Instead, I wrote a book about what it was like to parent struggling teenagers (yes, plural) while working as a private college counselor in Palo Alto, home to excellent schools and towering expectations.
Sharing my story was terrifying, but along the way, I found many others who had also suffered quietly and felt deeply alone in a community focused on conventional metrics of success.
In that Utah conference room, I was too shell-shocked to fully understand that we and our children were successful too. Our success was simple: our children were alive. They were safe. We would get to hold them in our arms again, and that was the best holiday gift anyone could want.
Let’s normalize talking about hard stuff out loud.
This commentary was written for KQED Perspectives and aired on 6/7/23. You can listen to the audio version HERE.
For more of my reflections about college admissions, parents, children, and books ranging from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to The Odyssey, check out my memoir The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays.