I’m Not Successful Enough

And I feel like a failure because of it. 

Living By Bike Newsletter October 31.

What I’m Listening to rn: autumn vintage jazz (perfect evening playlist); early morning autumn jazz (same but for the mornings); my girlfriend’s Spotify mixes which feature Julia Jacklin, Big Thief, and Adrianne Lenker.

What I’m Reading rn: A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy by Jane McAlevey. I’m not often an audiobook girlie, but this one is great to listen to, and incredibly informative. Learn about how wages are determined, the history of the working class, your rights, freedoms, and who fought for/against them, and capitalism’s objective in respect to the working class.

What I’m Watching rn: Abbott Elementary. Perfect easy, funny, 20 minute long episode show.

Products to Share: ATW Builds shirt (notably the ACAB one) (use code LIVINGBYBIKE for 10% off your purchase). Also this tent, which I love, and is 30% off right now (that’s over $100 you’d be saving).

Upcoming Events:

November 24-26th, Montgomery County, Maryland: I have sold out my general admission tickets for my weekend bikepacking trip along the C&O Canal, BUT I have opened up cheaper tickets ($75) for anyone who still wants to bike with our group but didn’t signup in time for the general admission! Join this small group for a peaceful weekend of cycling!

Saturday, November 23rd, Baltimore, MD: Bikemore’s annual Cranksgiving is here! Race start at Harborplace Light Street Pavilion at 12pm. Manifests emailed to riders at 1:00pm and ends around 3pm. After-party and awards ceremony at Harborplace Light Street Pavilion from 3:30-6pm Early Bird Registration is open beginning today, and goes until November 3rd. Click Here to Early Bird Register!

Chloe Vegan is 23 years old and releasing her first cookbook. She has 1 million followers and only 354 posts. Sewing with Solana just hit the 1-year mark of posting on Instagram/YouTube and has 625k followers, a pop-up store, sewing classes, sewing patterns, and 59.8k subscribers on YouTube. Reneé Rapp is 24 years old and is the artist behind the phenomenal album Snow Angel, one of the main reasons why I bought tickets to All Things Go this year (she wasn’t the headliner (she was runner up to Bleachers) but she will always be the headliner to me). Drew Afualo is 29 years old, exudes confidence across every ounce of her being, has a successful book, podcast, and social media presence, earning her $2M a year and has been a Forbes top 50 creator for the past two years. Amanda Montell wrote NYT-bestselling The Age of Magical Overthinking, Cultish and Wordslut, leading to her Magical Overthinkers and Sounds Like A Cult podcasts. Spencer Barbosa just turned 22 but has 2.3 million followers on Instagram and 2.5 million on YouTube, something she grew in just two years as she preaches body acceptance, self-love, and her girliest self.

I look at these other young and successful women and I wonder why I am not as achieved as they are. To me, that means failure. 

The thing is, I do feel like I am behind. There are all these other successful, beautiful, radiating women out there doing incredible things, and here I am, feeling like I only just stepped out from being a complete frantic mess and into being a semi-organized work-in-progress. I try not to compare myself to these other people. I have no idea what their life was like before they came to be where they are today. I don’t know if they had prior expertise in marketing, grew up with a family that instilled in them self-confidence, or if they are neurotypical or neurodivergent, and how that positively or negatively affected their lives. For many of these women, they turn their struggles into their success. Whether it is fighting misogyny online, channeling their anxiety into books, or their past eating disorders into self-love, they provide the greater world with a solution to something they too may be fighting. I often wonder why my struggles haven’t manifested into something that pays me thousands of dollars a year yet like it has for them.

It feels like I’m in the Rat Race, and I’m tired of paying all these B.I.L.L.S. (I’m channeling my inner Towa Bird right now as I feel frenetic anxiety over whether or not the cost of living will skyrocket if Trump imposes a 20% tarif that he’s been screaming about- as if the post-covid inflation wasn’t enough for half of the country that earns below $75k a year)! I just want to work less and live more, while being financially sound. Is that so hard to ask?

Let me break it down for you (as to what I want):

• The 4-day work week (with no reduction in pay) has been proven, once again, to improve worker productivity and well-being. Take a look at Iceland here. Or google the 4-day work week pilot program in the U.K.. It’s been tried and tested and it is true- the 4-day work week is better for literally everyone. People are more efficient at work, less stressed, and get more done in pretty much every aspect of their lives. I don’t want to work 40+ hours a week. I don’t want to spend all my energy working for a job that doesn’t care if I’m alive or dead. I want to earn plentifully enough to live.
• I want to be creative. I NEED to be creative. If you are a creatively minded person, you know how giving up your craft negatively impacts your life- you are repressing a core part of your identity. Creative expression is as important to me as having friends and a social life. The more I push it out of my life in the name of something else (*cough cough* a job), the more depressed, anxious, and straight up weird (in the bad ways) I become. I have done my best to fit my art into the crevices of my life, and I can’t do that anymore. It needs to be at the forefront. It needs to be a priority. I need to be actively creative in my life.
• I want to travel. I want to be able to pick up and go, basically whenever I feel like it. I know people talk so much hype around digital nomadism, and I’m not saying it’s wrong, but I want to travel and not work. I don’t like the idea of staying in a hostel with a valuable laptop and iffy wifi, feeling stressed that my irrelevant company might be upset if I can’t make a Zoom call in a quiet environment. I don’t want go to another country just to stay glued to my computer or in a hotel. And I definitely don’t want some random, soulless job that touts the freedom of remote work as a justification for low pay or poor work culture. I want to feel free when I travel, and maybe do a little bit of work here and there, only if it actually satisfies my soul. I want to be able to travel whenever I want, stay as long as I want, and leave whenever I want, without feeling the constraints of a typical job.
• Speaking of which, I only want to work jobs that actually make me happy and feel as though I am contributing something positive back into the world while paying me well (AND all under 32 hours of work a week).

Is this too much to ask?

Let’s bring this back to the self-comparison of other influencers from before. Some are a bit older than me, others are the same (I am 25 btw) and others are younger. They seem to be successful. I mean, they do most of what I’ve just said: travel, make good money, do things they love and enjoy. I am envious of them, because I have been hacking away at this since I graduated college in 2021 (well, only semi-seriously around the end of 2021). I’m three years into this, I don’t really make anything at all from social media (although I am supported by a few brands via their products, and I am ever so grateful to them for that!), and that’s why I feel like I am a failure. It is so easy to see the success of others and assume everything the best about them, and the worst about myself. Why did they succeed whereas I have not?

Pause.

Breathe.

…

Let’s reflect on my life a little bit.

Several major health scares, physical and mental. Definitely should have been in a psychiatric facility a couple of times over the years. I considered filing for disability at one point? Progressively cut-off all my immediate family members because relationships with them only made everything worse. Moved four times in one year. Worked a job that I was unqualified for and hated, and had to deal with the imposter syndrome that came from it (I was setup for failure). Did I ever tell you guys that I literally slept on a couch for 2.5 months in 2022? My feet hung over the armrest because I was too tall for the loveseat frame. Or did I tell you how when I asked my mom to stop drinking, she basically just yelled at me and told me “if you don’t like it, then leave”, so I moved out the next morning as she ”helped” toss my bags hatefully onto the front porch while I loaded them into the van (thank you dead Aunt Jeanne, I hope you know that as unfortunate as it was that you died so suddenly, you absence became my access to escaping that home)(I moved into Aunt Jeanne’s house less than two weeks after she died). My dad was withholding my money from dead Aunt Jeanne, and I was filing court cases, seeking legal counsel and consulting with family members and friends on how to get it from him. I applied to Medicaid four times before they finally accepted me? Wild. I applied to become a bike tour guide for one company, paid the $350 for their 8-day training program, went to the program, then left the last day hysterically sobbing because they singled me out for my personality and political beliefs, and feigned compassion for what I was going through while blaming me for what happened during the training program (less than two weeks before that program I flew to California last minute because someone close to me said they were going to commit suicide, so I spent five days being their full-time caretaker and helping reorient their life)(then during the training program students at my college campus were being physically beaten by police for demanding an end to our school’s financial contribution to the Palestinian genocide and I was petrified of other loved ones being assaulted). I’m going to stop now. Enough said. My life has been a clusterfuck for a long time (and I only touched the surface of it for these three years). Only now has it finally felt like the storm is reaching its calm.

Breathe Claire. It’s fine. Everything is fine. Ev-er-y-thing is FINE. There is no need to compare yourself to others. You know nothing about their lives and what brought them to where they are today, just like your followers only know a small sliver of your life. BTW, for those of you still reading this, congrats on making it this far! Please know that my life is not perfect, and please, PLEASE do not envy me. Every time someone tells me that they wish they had my life I want to vomit and tell them that they literally do not want to be me- they have some idealized version of my life in their heads and not the real thing. My life has been a mess and I cannot escape chaos. My head is bobbing above water… I just make it look cool, somehow… I guess (yay for biking?).

I’m going to wrap things up soon now, since this newsletter is becoming a black hole of my anxiety/depression raveled up into the American Dream better known as the rat race away from poverty which is criminalized in our country. I want to make something financially viable from Living By Bike. I want freedom in the way that I believe it to be free. I want to be my highest, happiest, healthiest self, and a sense of purpose that positively impacts this world and my personal life. I know I have the grounds for something to come from this, but I just am not sure what it is, or how to realize it.

I’m not asking anyone here to fix my life or provide me with the answers I need. I write all of this to you, share this with you, to remind you that good things take time, and that one person’s perceived success does not take away from your own. We must stop making assumptions about others. Some people like Billy Porter never caught their big break until it was far into their careers. Some people like Demi Lovato endured psychological trauma from reaching fame at such a young age, causing them to wonder if anything was really worth it. Elton John attempted suicide in 1975 by taking an absurd amount of Valium and jumping into a pool in front of his loved ones. Iohan Gueorguiev, ‘Bike Wanderer’ of the Wilderness, died at 33 doing the very thing that I do (albeit, more extremely). We don’t actually know anything about anyone else’s life, and if we are lucky enough to get a book or documentary from it, then we should listen to their story. Because at the end of the day, we have only our assumptions about other people’s lives. We better not get wrapped up in it all.

“Comparison is the thief of joy” is what they say. I personally believe that corporate greed is the modern day thief of joy, but I do think that comparison (which social media only makes easier) makes pretty much everything worse.

Good luck out there, stay cycling, get outside, and I wish you all the best in your own life, hopefully one that doesn’t include a never ending and exhausting rat race.

Best wishes,

Claire

Original post can be found here on Substack.