Academic validation resulting from great academic achievement may be for most students the form of validation that gives them the greatest satisfaction. From the outside, students who are academic overachievers may seem like they have everything they ever wanted, that they live for the achievements they work really hard for. But at the end of the day, is it really worth it?
My response to the question above, as I used to be an overachiever as well, is that sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn’t. At first, the satisfaction can be felt through the veins, because after the hard work that was put into the process, you finally feel rewarded. Even though the reward may be material, the true reward is being acknowledged as being academically smart, and the feeling of being academically validated is actually the greatest reward ever received by an overachiever. The need for academic validation is like a drug. Once you start, you can hardly control the feelings and efforts put in order to receive it. So, it becomes like a cycle. What is more, after starting down the academic path, everyone expects the person to maintain their position as the best in the fields they have succeeded in, and even gain success in other fields as well, which does nothing but bring harm to one’s mental health. The reason this mentality brings harm is the fact that the worst fear of an overachiever is failure. Most of them will not only be affected by the disappointment of failing, but also be affected by knowing that people expected an achievement from them, and this will nonetheless make them feel like a disappointment to everyone.
Working towards a goal is something everyone should do, but it should be done in a controlled way. Overachievers tend to work so hard that they exclude every single distraction from their way, even if it means social media, music, or even people. There’s no obstacle existent in their way, which demonstrates great ambition. But, there is always a price to be paid. They’ve pursued their goal, they are satisfied with the work they’ve done and the result, but at the end of the day, they are alone, because during the process of achieving, they isolated themselves from the real world. Moreover, as their whole coping mechanism is validation, this is why most overachievers are never satisfied with their accomplishments, they never give up and also, after some time, they stop feeling rewarded for their work. They may succeed academically, but sometimes loneliness gets to them. They feel the need to have someone understand the way they feel, to give them the motivation to work harder, but they can’t have that someone because of not letting anyone in. Personally, I think that the hardest part of being an overachiever is not overcoming failure, as you can get used to failure. The hardest part is being alone while overcoming it. Overachievers isolate themselves while they are working towards a goal, and most of the times when they finish with the particular goal, the people that they isolated themselves from in order to not have any distractions are not there anymore, as they can not maintain a stable relationship, be it either romantic or platonic.
So, to be more straight-forward with the answer to the question asked in the first paragraph, I don’t think that it’s actually worth it all. It is satisfying to be academically validated, to know that you are valued for being intelligent, but it’s not worth being valued only for it, because at the end of the day, the feeling of loneliness puts that satisfaction in the shadows. I’ve learned that it is impossible to have both constant academic validation and happiness, but the trick is that keeping them balanced and in control may give one overachiever a taste of both.
Written by Mihaela Răduț
18.04.2023
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