A Lovely Light

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light!

“The First Fig,” Edna St. Vincent Millay

One afternoon, while I was subbing, I happened to encounter the teacher whose class I was in during my lunch. They were in the building for some reason which doesn’t matter to the story. “Watch out for your next hour,” they said. “I have a lot of girls, and they can get kind of…” 

I waited for the teacher to supply the adjective, but they grimaced and waved their hand in a You know gesture. 

“Squirrelly?” I guessed, because that is how I describe approximately 90% of the students I have towards the end of May and early June because school is out in two weeks and it’s hot out and look, there’s a substitute! 

“No,” they said, and hesitated before saying, “Kind of…catty.” 

Class came and went, and let me tell you, almost all of those girls were talented artists, writers, and students.  All in all, it was a great class, and I left a glowing report. 

But that word, catty, stuck with me. Girls are catty. They are clique-y, and too focused on their looks, and they will claw each other’s eyes out if the situation warrants it. That is what I have been told, and that is what many people believe.

“I have, like, no girl friends,” a girl once told me. “Girls start so much drama.” 

I wanted to point out to that girl that she was also a girl, and if girls started drama then ipso facto so did she, and anyway, her boy friends started enough drama to support a bad daytime soap opera for years. But I refrained from saying this because I like to believe I am a nice person.

This is one of the reasons I am so in love with Shine Theory. According to Shine Theory, surrounding yourself with talented, upbeat, intelligent, successful women does not lessen your chances of succeeding in life (or your chances to live drama-free), but actually increases it. These friends will help you to grow and show you new opportunities you might have missed on your own. And I am incredibly lucky, because I just happen to be surrounded by amazingly talented, gorgeous women, almost all of whom have just graduated with their MAs or are finishing up with them in the next year.

The real problem, however, comes with comparing yourself to others. 

Shine Theory, if done right, does not involve comparing yourself to others. That’s toxic, and destroys happiness. However, it’s hard to avoid, especially if, like me, you’re surrounded by women who actually seem to be succeeding at their life. 

While I would never see myself as competing with my friend group—only one of them is in the field I’m in—it’s very hard for me to stop comparing myself to others. This summer I graduated, and I am literally going out of my mind comparing myself to others. “I’m failing,” a little voice in the back of my head tells me. “So-and-so already has a job, and I have none. So-and-so is working a job with benefits only a few years after graduation, and this summer I have no job lined up at all.”

This thinking tears me up inside. Especially because when I hang out with my successful friends I leave feeling refreshed. I leave buzzing with ideas, and new thoughts, and I fall asleep with a smile on my face. When I stay away, I end up in a self-defeatist spiral. 

Gregory Colon Semenza, who wrote this amazing book called Graduate Study for the 21^st Century, says that graduate students looking for summer work need to stick to library jobs, because if a student works all day in a library at the end of their shift they’ll find it easy to transition to writing scholarly essays or writing PhD applications. If a student works a donut shop, however, Semenza says it will be very difficult to transition from selling glazed donuts to writing seminar papers. 

I think it’s safe to say that the same thing goes for friends. When I hang out with my successful friends, I easily transition into a good mood, and I can settle into my writing and my studies. My brain evens out; I stop the crazy see-saw of self-hated and vague optimism. Other people drain me, though. I used to work with a girl whose primary motive in life was to get drunk and stay out all night. After a while I got tired just looking at her, because all of her stories exhausted me. I was too tired to write, too tired to think about working; I just wanted to sleep all the time.

The point of Shine Theory is that you shine when the women around you shine. When I feel dull and lusterless, it can be very difficult to contemplate seeing my friends; I feel a little like I’ll be blinded by their light. The little snake of jealousy curls around my heart, and tells me that the absolute last thing I want in this world is to have to hang out with people that are smarter and more talented than I am. But I am never blinded by them. They coax the little dying embers of my own candle and get it out from underneath the bushel basket, even when I have been burning it, like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s candle, at both ends—with jealousy and self-condemnation. 

My friends happen to be amazing. And guess what? So am I. After all, my friends have excellent taste in everything, from books to the people they choose to hang out with on Saturday night.