“You know what I wanna mess with? The belief that I matter, you know? Regardless of what I do or don’t achieve. Or the belief that we all deserve to be loved, whether we’ve been hurt or maybe we’ve hurt someone else.” — Ted in Ted Lasso.
Ted Lasso is an absurd comedy about an inexperienced and unqualified American who knows nothing about soccer hired to coach a professional English soccer team. But Ted Lasso also emphasizes loving yourself and loving for who you are, and in season 3, Ted has earned the trust of his players and gives the speech that all his players matter regardless of what they do or don’t achieve after a low point of their season where their best player abruptly retired from soccer and quit the team.
I, at times, have a hard time with Ted’s message. I sometimes do, unfortunately, define myself over what I do and what I can accomplish on a given day. I chase wins — a lot of small wins, but I do chase wins throughout the day to keep myself motivated and the sense that I’m moving forward with my life, not backward, and not staying stagnant.
There’s a certain sort of pain that it feels like only I experience. It’s the pain of fixating, of a lingering sort of unhappiness. I don’t really know how to describe it, but there’s this hunger that only gets temporarily satisfied when I accomplish one goal and then move on to another.
It’s what drives my ambition and for me to accomplish what I have accomplished, but at times it feels like no one suffocates me more than I do myself. No accomplishment can please me or make me happy for more than a day or so. There’s always the next step or the next level, and the need for even more continuous growth.
As a law student and teacher, I want to get better grades in law school. I want to get better student outcomes and more of my students to come to school, pass their classes, and develop socially. As a marathon runner, I want to run faster. I want to read more, make more money, and be involved with more social events.
I don’t want these things just as a means to an end, but rather for the thrill and love of the process and feelings of improvement and feeling like I’m advancing and moving forward— the feeling of being stuck feels debilitating. It has not become enough that I did my best, tried hard, and maybe it wasn’t good enough on a given day and some random variable or bad luck stopped me from accomplishing my goals. Sometimes, I know I shouldn’t, but I do tie my self-worth directly to results.
I also struggle, unfortunately, with all-or-nothing mindsets or thinking. I will have one bad grade or run one bad marathon and think “that’s it. I failed. It’s over. It’s all a failure, and I need to completely rethink how I do life” or something like that.
It is a cliche to love yourself no matter what you do, accomplish, or achieve. It’s a cliche that I preach to others and myself on a spiritual and religious level, as a Christian.
But it’s a lot easier said than done if you feel like you must be a high achiever. There have been people critical of me in the past — but there’s no one more critical than myself. There are words and phrases I tell myself in my head that are unprintable on the Internet, but they are degrading and emasculating as a means to motivate myself and fulfill those goals. It works temporarily and in the short term, but suffice to say, it’s probably unhealthy in the long term.
There’s another anti-hero in Ted Lasso, Jamie Tartt. Jamie Tartt is originally an incredibly cocky bully who thinks he’s better than everyone else and acts like it. He is the most talented player on the team who scores the most points, so a lot of people don’t push back against his bullying, with the exception of the coach and the captain.
We soon discover that what motivates Jamie, or at least what explains his behavior, is a borderline abusive, alcoholic father who insults and degrades Jamie — in front of his teammates. Jamie’s father is obsessed with his son’s football success and his love is very conditional on Jamie’s athletic performance. Jamie is eventually fed up with the amount of pressure and criticism his father puts on him, and the two get into a physical confrontation in front of all his teammates after his father curses at him and disrespects his whole team in the locker room.
It was a painful, therapeutic moment that moved multiple members of the team to tears, and it completely explained the trauma behind why Jamie was who he was. It starts the quest for Jamie to become a much better person, teammate, and leader.
The issue, in terms of Jamie’s performance on the soccer field, is that he feels unmotivated and has not been the same player without the desire to prove his father wrong and the anger and resentment against his father.
In Season 3, we meet Jamie’s mother, who’s very much the opposite. Jamie’s mother tells him she does not care how his team plays or how many goals he scores. It doesn’t matter if his team loses. To her, it only matters that Jamie is happy.
He plays in a game against Manchester City, where Jamie seems to suffer from an injury. Ted recognizes that most of it is in his head, and Jamie does eventually return to the game. Before he does so, he urges Jamie to forgive his father, not for his father, but for himself. It’s advice that’s concurrent with Ted’s own relationship with his mother at this moment, but it works. Jamie returns and scores the game-winning goal.
Ted Lasso is a feel-good comedy where everything seems to work out as long as everyone is healed from their trauma and loves each other enough. In the real world, you can do the latter, but often not have the results of the former.
I connect somewhat deeply with the show. It’s no secret that my state of only being happy when I’ve won at something or achieved something doesn’t come from nowhere. I come from an Asian culture that is obsessed with conditional love based on results, whether it’s career or academic success. The concept of unconditional love is almost a foreign term, and almost every act of good faith feels like it’s transactional based on some later pay-off for the investment of parenting.
I’m no fool and realize results matter and this is just how the world works. And despite all the swagger and big talk, there are often times where actions don’t always align with stated values or words. When someone is in trouble in the community, there is often a banding together of financial assistance despite all the shit-talking that may happen behind closed doors.
I think a lot of the logic behind people like Jamie’s father or the culture I was raised in is that the world is cruel. The world will not love you unconditionally. The real world is not one of forgiveness or one that will lend you support when you are in trouble. The real world is not going to be very trusting. The real world is cutthroat, one where a lot of people will only love you for what you can do for them, where people will only care about your results. In the real world, a lot of people will not care about what you have going on, whether it’s a sick relative or being overwhelmed as a parent — a lot of people will only care about what you can do for them.
For so many who have been through poverty and worse, this cruelty is felt on a much more elevated level. And so you fight back and push back with material success that no one can deny. You get the degrees next to your name, the extra digits on your salary, the trophies and accomplishments to pad your resume. This material, outward success is seen as defining and all that matters because you have been written off or forgotten about by the world for such a long time, and your new success, accomplishments, and status give you a seat at the table and give you the recognition and material means of mattering.
Although I believe in the goodness of humanity, I have unfortunately seen significantly more instances and reasons to be pessimistic. My faith still warrants a dogmatic rigidity in loving my neighbor, but as I’ve been exposed to more and more tragedy and trauma in my work and my personal life, I internalize more and more that this is a cruel and messy world, and, more often than not, you have to have your guard up. I drive by homeless people on the street every day, with signs pleading generosity and sympathy. I see almost everyone drive by or walk past these homeless people like they don’t exist — I used to try to be the exception more often than not, but now, I am, more often than not, one of these people.
While we can’t control how others view us, we can control how we view and treat ourselves. We cannot control the “real world,” but we can make the choice of how we define ourselves.
I want to make the choice of not only being someone who loves others unconditionally, regardless of their results, accomplishments, and what they can do for me. I’m trying to regain some of that idealism I had when I was younger. But I also want to be someone who loves myself unconditionally, regardless of the world’s successes or failures.
It’s not a new goal, per se. It’s something I’ve been wanting and trying to do for ages. It’s something I’ve preached, but self-acceptance and love is something that’s been more difficult for me in practice. I’m doing all the right things to get there — whether it’s therapy or mantras reminding me to do so.
I don’t think I or anyone raised like me will ever shed away with the sense that you’re defined by what you achieve or accomplish. It’s a lifelong mission. And I don’t want to shed that external validation to prove anyone wrong. It’s a healthier way to think and treat yourself. And to me, it seems like leveling up to a higher spiritual sense of well-being and satisfaction, the realization that there are a lot of things that matter much, much more than all these material and worldly gains.
But the truth is what we aim for, particularly an ideal that can be so complicated by real-life complications like unconditional self-love, is never something we can just accomplish with the snap of a finger. It’s a lifelong struggle, with a lot of steps forward and backward, complicated by tumultuous conditions and complications. As Kierkegaard once said, “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
So where I am is where I’m supposed to be right now, and wherever you are is also where you’re supposed to be. We all matter and deserve to be loved, regardless of what we achieve, and no one can give us that love and belief that we matter more than we can ourselves.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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