How can you accurately assess your impact in the world? In reality, you can’t ever know with certainty. But there is still valuable understanding there, how do you develop a sense of perspective on the ways you impact the people, creatures, and places around you that is accurate enough to guide your actions and keep your head on straight? For at least the last 3 or 4 years, I have been feeling like I don’t matter and what I do doesn’t have an impact. Sitting with this realization is uncomfortable for me. I reflexively want to fix it, to start reading books about strengthening my internal validation, or to start doing more so I know I matter. I start feeling like I’m self-pitying and tell myself to “suck it up”
Rationally, I know my perception of my impact cannot be reality— that what I do does actually matter—but why are our brains hard-wired to make many of us feel that way? I have literally saved people’s lives. I have found the reversible cause of someone’s debilitating pain so they get the procedure they need to relieve it. A few months ago, someone told me that my kindness when they came into the ER drunk is the reason she got sober. She told me she’s been sober for 4 years, and it has totally changed her relationship with her kids. All of us are sending out these ripples everyday, but it’s very rare that we get the blessed feedback about where our ripples go and what those ripples shift.
Certainly, it’s important to know that we matter in a negative way too. I know there are times where I stayed quiet when I should have spoken up. These have had small and big impacts. How do we accurately assess these sins of omission and our negative ripples? If I had to guess, I’d say that we learned from people whom we respect who bravely shared how they failed and how they knew they failed.
I aspire to be a person who shares her failures generously. However, sharing failures well is a unique skill too. It can easily shift to self-flagellation. It’s easy for our brains to jump to “I failed” every time a story ends in a disappointing way, which it often does in medicine. It requires clear vision to look at a situation and your role in it, to assess where your actions could have made a meaningful difference, rather than blaming yourself for the inevitable. That’s the challenge of sharing a failure story badly. If you’re blaming yourself for the inevitable, you teach those listening that level of self-recrimination is necessary—desirable even—to be at your best. It encourages them to try to control things over which they have no control. That way leads to madness.
Sharing a genuine failure is a rare gift. I can think of mentors who have shared heartbreaks, but not mentors who have shared failures. When you share where you have come up short with another, particularly someone who has a great deal of respect for you like your student or your child, it makes a huge difference. You being human, makes space for others being human. Your self-forgiveness makes space for their self-forgiveness. Your learning makes space for their learning. The sharing of this story allows both of you to see that the edits that we make to our story may take years or decades before they are ready to publish.
I think most people are pretty hard on themselves. We underestimate the ways that we matter and how often we matter. We measure ourselves by the worst things we’ve done rather than the sum of our beautiful, messy, complicated parts.
I’m still no closer to knowing how we know our impact. But I do know that one terrific place to start is reflecting on those who have impacted us and how. Then we have to tell them.