By Evelyn Lam
Graduating Opinion Editor
Making Spotify playlists is the way I think through emotions that are too difficult to process. It’s hard to listen to them in retrospect, and I cringe looking at my old playlist names. Still, I treasure them as time capsules from a past mental state.
I want to share one of these playlists, titled: A never enough kinda girl. Again, not the wittiest name, but fitting nonetheless. I made this playlist in sophomore year. I hit a plateau in competitive debate, earned my first B and navigated my first bad relationship. Nothing felt right, and nothing was enough.
I couldn’t make it past the semi-final round in every debate tournament. I’d advance to the final selection, only to be turned down for internships and programs. I was distinguishedly mediocre—good but never good enough.
So I made a playlist. It was scrambled in genre but unwaveringly consistent in theme: songs about ambition, insatiable desires and impossible expectations. My playlist encapsulated the tortuous life of the perpetual semi-finalist—the feeling of getting so close, only for the door to slam in your face.
Every time I thought that I had finally reached my breakthrough, I was left disappointed. Those moments of false hope stung more than flat out rejection. I contemplated every minute mistake, and the more I thought about what I could’ve done differently, the more I let the failures define me.
I started to view each marginal miss as a personal attack. There must be something fundamentally wrong with me. I must be innately unlucky and untalented.
I used this thinking to absolve myself from responsibility. By blaming each failure on luck or an inherent character flaw, I forfeited my agency. I told myself that hard work solely guarantees a more devastating let down.
I tried less, and eventually conditioned myself to expect less. The issue was that I never wanted more.
As it turns out, you can tell yourself that you’ll stop trying so hard, but you can’t truly desire less—in fact, I’m not sure if I want to.
Sure, it might be easier to give up, but it was through uninhibited ambition that I got this far in the first place. It is a privilege to be disappointed—to be so passionate that failure feels gutwrenching.
In the end, whether or not I received the trophy or acceptance letter didn’t take away from the journey, and each struggle made the occasional victory more significant.
I realize now that the “never enough kinda girl” isn’t the girl who can’t be content with her success. “Never enough” girls are the ones that keep going even when they’re fed up with rejection.
We define our own limits. We are not too ambitious or too impossible, and the eternal chase is exactly where I want to be.