TikTok and its army of pseudo mental health specialists have slowly turned into my primary care providers, and they say the first step to solving a problem is to acknowledge it. They say it’s an “integral part of the healing journey.” After a lot of thought, I think I’m ready to say it out loud. Here it goes.
I’m an overcommitter.
I’ve been refusing to face the facts. I’d always found it deeply shameful and prescriptive when someone dared point out my condition. They’d look at me, then at my schedule, wide-eyed and afraid. Some would cock their heads to show heartfelt concern for my well-being, others would be armed with sharper looks and opinions. But all of them would end their charade with the same sentence: “girl, are you okay?” I loathed the question and its underlying judgement. I thought, maybe if you were busier you’d have less time to think about what others are doing instead. That was the voice of my petty denial speaking.
My impulse is to go off on a tangent and justify my actions, try to convince the interlocutor that it’s not as bad as they think. Maybe I’d even go so far as to say that I’m “great at managing my time.” But the Google Calendar does not lie.
That’s not the point of this piece.
We must start by understanding the virus. Because yes, this is an issue that concerns all of us—victims and perpetrators alike–even those who are not ready to admit it yet. So I hope my words can aid all overcommitters in their healing journeys. You could go to therapy, but this is cheaper.
We must start by identifying how one becomes an overcommitter. An overcommitter is born when a hoarder and a person with ambition have unprotected sex. The product is a desire to do everything, and a deeply delusional conviction that they might pull it off. They thrive in environments where the presence of other overcommitters is dense. Some giveaways are the agility with which they skitter past clearly-less-busy slow walkers, their bulging handbags whose straps rip at the seams, their caffeine intake (since meeting with people over coffee has become standard etiquette, I personally range from 3-4), and their tendency to hit the Serena van der Woodsen mid-conversation: “I have to go…”
The disorganized cousin of the “over-achiever,” the overcommitter is a strategic entity. Many overcommitters cope with their condition by cherry-picking where it’s most acceptable and least consequential for them to fall short. It’s easier to feel less accountable when you constantly teeter the line of doing enough to stay on a project, but not doing as much as you promised you would. If, say, someone (totally not me), were to commit to writing a column for a student magazine (totally not the Herald) once every two weeks, but also had to attend tech for the three-to-four shows they sign up to work on about once a month, then that person would probably not have the time to write bi-weekly pieces. They would do it with less frequency, showing up to editorial meetings frazzled, burnt out, and deeply aware that they’ve been ghosting their editors for a few days. Hi, Arts Desk.
But why, you ask, is overcommitment a problem concerning anyone but the person suffering from it? Overcommitment turns its host into a patient zero, and it is the leading cause of declining quality in the arts at Yale. The presence of an overcommitter on a play’s production team, for example, increases the chances of the show falling behind by a significant degree. If the perpetrator is an actor, director, stage manager or producer, the probability can be as high as 70-80%, as I’ve come to learn, having been both the offender and the offendee. Some symptoms caused by frequent contact with an overcommitter include bubbled-up frustration, having to step in to do someone else’s job, chronic cursing, and gastritis.
In all seriousness, though, the functioning of Yale’s art world fundamentally relies on collaboration between student artists. Artistic and social lives at Yale go hand-in-hand, because even beyond the art-centric student organizations, Yale functions in troupes, and most people find that having organized communities of friends to rely on is like social life insurance. Naturally, overcommitters gravitate towards artistic groups as a way to combine passion and pleasure, to seek out a community that fits with their interests.
However, it’s easy to conflate the desire to be part of a group to build an artistic practice and the goal of building community, as one forgets the commitment required by the former in pursuit of the latter. This does not mean that both cannot be held dear: one may be able to find artistic and social fulfillment in the same space, but looking for that in too many spaces and frantically tossing your eggs in too many baskets means some are bound to crack and spill.
The point is that genuine passion does not come from maximizing the number of things you have to be passionate about, but rather from turning the projects you love into reality.
In the overcommitter’s mind, the juggling feels like an appropriate, inevitable byproduct of their devotion to work. How could you ever expect someone to choose one thing and just stick to it with the array of incredible opportunities that we’re presented with in college? I hope this tear-jerker story doesn’t make you weep, but I never got to work on any theater before coming to Yale. I always had a passion for the performing arts, but I never had the resources to get involved in intricate, large-scale projects. And learning that you’re good at something that you’re also passionate about is an addicting feeling. When presented with all these choices, overcommitting feels like going to a diner when you’re starving and ordering five different kinds of pancakes (which I believe is a totally justifiable offense by the way).
To be clear though, we cannot forgive overcommitters. Not even those who, by some miracle or self-destructive practice, manage to commit properly to all of their pursuits. This is because fundamentally, overcommitters valorize a ritual of art-making that is not about the art itself, but rather, rabidly maximized creation. What overcommitment really unveils are the incredibly individualistic tendencies that fester among students at institutions like Yale, places that seek out ambition and fertilize it to the point of turning innocent aspirations into insatiable appetites. But as young students living on a college campus, with our social lives being so integral to our existence, we are constantly torn between our desire to belong and our desire to impress. We are so focused on integrating ourselves into these spaces that we turn our attention away from the actual work we commit to, and become selfish. Rather than thinking about working, we become obsessed with what it means for us to be doing the work. The artist becomes ego, and passion becomes hunger.
The overcommitter must die for passionate art to reign supreme. But I don’t really have time to die today. I have to check my Google Calendar. Anyway. I have to go.