My husband turns forty this week, and in the midst of all the preparations for his birthday party, I’ve been reflecting on different milestones and moments of achievement in my life.
I passed the forty milestone a few years ago (I won’t say how many!) and we celebrated fifteen years of marriage last year. Our son will be ten this year, so that will require another celebration, as he enters double digits. These are some recent milestones in my personal life.
There have also been milestones and achievements in my writing career. Having The Heir accepted for publication was one of them. Having all the books in my trilogy published was another, and especially, seeing The Heir win the Literary Classics silver award in their science fiction section in 2014 was also a big one.
However, it’s interesting to note my attitude when it comes to talking about those kinds of achievements. I always find it more difficult to tell people about things like that. Sometimes it feels too much like boasting. A few years ago I was at a seminar at my son’s school, and they asked everyone to write down their greatest achievement. I wrote down The Heir winning its award, but when everyone else read theirs out, they were all things like losing weight and finding more time to read . Mine felt so self-congratulatory I struggled to share it. But I knew it was worth sharing. It was something important that happened to me and I was right to feel proud of my achievement. For the record, the other people in attendance didn’t seem to consider me boastful or arrogant when I told them. Instead, they were interested.
Sometimes it’s hard to remember that it’s all right to feel proud of the things we achieve, as long as we don’t use them as an opportunity to lord it over others. We all have talents and there’s no shame in celebrating them when we have a success.
Have you ever achieved something but were embarrassed to mention it? Let me know in the comments.
Oh yes Lynne – I felt exactly the same about my first book being accepted for publication and talking about being a published author. What stopped me from being embarrassed to talk about that and be proud of what I had achieved was during a writing workshop our writers group conducted several years ago, the ice-breaker we used was to get everyone who attended to write down – My name is (insert name) and I am a writer/author, and I like writing (insert genre). Each of us then shared what we had written down and then I asked the participants to share how they felt about speaking that statement out. Most were embarrassed, some said they would never say that because it was boasting, others were not sure how they felt. By the end of the workshop the feedback was that they could see that if they glorified God in the process by acknowledging that He is the giver of all good gifts, it put an entirely different slant on saying I am a writer/author.
It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who struggles with it!
Hi Lynne,
Congratulations on all those milestones. Some of them seem to come awfully fast when we’re talking about getting another year older.
Hmm, I think one of mine was scoring full marks in English at the end of Year 12, and being included in the honour roll in the Adelaide Advertiser for it. As you say, I often felt embarrassed about mentioning it, but since I never repeated the feat in the future at Uni, I decided it was good to have up my sleeve.
Full marks is fantastic, Paula! I never did that well in school.