Madison Scott

About

The person who usually finds me is extremely successful and cannot enjoy any of it. They have the position, the household, and the reputation, and they describe all of it with a strange flatness, as though reporting on someone else's achievements. That particular flatness has a common origin. Childhood wounds often produce adults who achieve compulsively while remaining unable to feel that anything is ever sufficient. The standard being met was set by circumstances rather than chosen. We look at whose standard it actually is, which is usually the first time anybody has asked, and it tends to be a really disorienting question. I worked a long time inside community mental health, where I saw very clearly that outward success predicts almost nothing about inward experience. The two are barely related. If you have everything and feel nothing about it, get in touch. Nobody has ever asked them whose approval they were chasing.