Don't Tell Me I Can't Do It! (6 page)

Even from a young age I liked to play with the boys. I swam and climbed trees with them, determined not to be a sissy like all the other girls I knew. I became indignant when others would say things like, “You’re a girl. You’re not supposed to do that.” I defied anyone who suggested that there might be something boys could do that I couldn’t—physically or otherwise.

I was ambitious. I was driven. I wanted all the options available to boys to be available to me as well. I wanted to achieve, and I would make it happen, with or without society’s blessing. That’s not to say that I ever questioned my gender identity or desired to be male; I definitely felt like a girl and enjoyed it. But I never experienced femininity as a limitation or constraint on my ambitions. I might be a girl, but I would be a brave girl, one who would fall down and scrape her arms but get back up and do it again like the boys did, one who would hold her own in a fight and take a licking without crying.

Although I didn’t understand it then, I was actually training for the kind of life I would find myself
called to live in adulthood, when all kinds of opposition would threaten to derail my ambitions. In fact, all of the hardships of childhood—including the barbarity of the concentration camp—were probably intended for just that purpose. Being the boy-girl, outcast survivor-performer suits me very well, and it has allowed me to pass on a life lesson that would sound trite were it to come from any other lips. Here it is:
There is no failure. Disappointments make the joy of accomplishments so much greater.

Perhaps because of all the times I’ve been told I can’t have or do something, I’ve developed a guttural aversion to the very idea itself. “Don’t tell me I can’t do it!” I say, and then I go out to prove my detractors wrong— even though sometimes they’re right. When I decided to begin exploring hypnotherapy in my professional career as a psychologist, for example, I was taught that hypnosis would not work in the treatment of eating disorders. I had no reason to distrust the instructor on this point; he was the expert, after all. But I still decided to test it for myself. When I had gained sufficient competence, I tried hypnotherapy with some of my clients
who were overeaters. As it turns out, the instructor was right. It didn’t work.

I never felt like that was a wasted effort, though. As I’ve said before, my policy is, “Trust, but always verify.” I may have failed to achieve what I set out to do, but I knew that the odds were stacked against me even before I started, and I could rest more easily with the truth of the matter just knowing that I hadn’t complacently accepted someone else’s say on the matter without looking into it for myself. I knew there would be no harm in failure here, but only the reward of having attempted something audacious. I’ve learned that there are few enduring rewards for those who blithely accept limitations and choose to entertain only those goals that seem realistic from a distance. It isn’t until we get in there and get our hands dirty that we can really understand what we can do—and more often than not, we find that we can do far more than we would have expected from ourselves. We owe it to ourselves to dream impudently big dreams and then go out and do our best to make them come true. I’m convinced that a great many people fail to enjoy the
things they want out of life, not because their desires are truly unrealistic, but because they lack the audacity to go out and achieve them.

Late in my life, I’ve begun feeling a certain urgency to help others discover this inner potential for themselves. Nothing gives me greater joy than helping people who have settled for the status quo catch a fresh vision for how they can redefine themselves and discover a brand new purpose for getting up in the morning. Whether we have five years or fifty remaining before us is irrelevant; every day is an opportunity for us to do those audacious things that will make a lasting impact on our world, to become the kind of people we most want to be. It’s never too late—and it’s never too early—to begin living a rich, meaningful life in the here and now.

I’ve also learned that frustrations are bittersweet gifts. There is no such thing as failure for those who have determined to settle for nothing less than their very best. At the point of exhaustion, when we have given our very last, very best effort to achieve something— if we then still come up short of our goal, no one can really say we failed in our endeavor. They can only say
we weren’t quite up to the task, and I (for one) am okay with that. Even when I don’t achieve what I most desire, I can rest easy knowing that I did my best. What I’m
not
okay with is standing idly by and missing out on something just because I never gave it a worthy try. I have this feeling—and it has often been reinforced— that when I want something badly enough, I can make it happen. Sure, I can be delusional, just like anyone else, but frequently I discover that the most difficult things to achieve are also the most rewarding to enjoy, and that makes them worth chasing.

I don’t believe in living modestly, not when there is the opportunity to live abundantly. For me, the difficulties incumbent to achieving the seemingly impossible are part of the thrill of audaciously living in the here and now. That’s because I’ve known many times the exhilaration of standing on the other side of those disappointments, where victory seems so much sweeter because it came at a higher cost.

As a young woman in Tel Aviv, I distinguished myself
from my peers by stubbornly refusing to settle down. Although my parents cut my studies at the agricultural school short, my desire for a good education remained as strong as ever. I think I must have inherited my intense interest in academia and the pursuit of knowledge from my father’s side. It’s one of the traits I cherish the most from my ancestral heritage. Most young people of that era in Israel, boys and girls alike, weren’t particularly compelled to seek a high school diploma. None of my friends opted to go to high school, and that was the norm. Work was valued; education was not.

I wanted both.

Since money was scarce, I would have no choice but to work my way through high school. Ambitious and highly motivated, I managed to hold down two separate jobs while attending school at night. From 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., I worked on an assembly line in a cardboard box factory, where I was evaluated on my speed and efficiency assembling cartons. I was never very popular with my coworkers there because I inadvertently raised the bar for everyone. We were supposed to turn out twenty boxes per hour, but I had little trouble doubling that figure. I still remember my
coworkers’ resentful looks. I didn’t care. I was only interested in doing my best.

Between 4:00 and 6:00 p.m., I worked as a receptionist in a music school. I was in class from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m., and then I would usually study until well after midnight, sometimes as late as 2:00 a.m. (Studying in a language other than my mother tongue was quite a challenge, after all.) I was a very busy girl. Work and school consumed my life for three years, which meant that I had practically no social life, but I was also the only one among my peers who earned a high school diploma. Shortly afterward, I enlisted in the Israeli Air Force and spent two amazing years in service to my homeland. It was an empowering experience, one that has remained with me for a lifetime.

Boys weren’t important to me. Achievement, focus, proving that I was smart—that’s what motivated me then and still motivates me now. I resisted the lure of romance during my military service, and even after I left the Air Force, I remained the only one in my circle of friends who wasn’t part of a couple. I went out for a while with this one particular guy, but now I don’t even remember his name. I do remember that everyone
around me expected us to get married, and I suppose I probably would have married him eventually, but I wanted to give myself one more chance to be unique, to be independent. I wanted one more chance to experience the world “according to Erica.”

So instead of looking for a husband, I decided to look for another job. I didn’t want just any job; I wanted to do something prestigious. I set my sights on a position with the Israeli Government Tourist Information Office, where I would interact routinely with foreign visitors to our country. I knew that in order to do well in a role like that, I would have to improve my
English skills. High school had helped, but I wasn’t yet very fluent. So I got to work. I studied English with the same intensity I brought to everything else. I spent hours upon hours and days on end examining dictionaries, reading books, writing pages and pages of “this means this; that means that,” and rehearsing my diction and grammar in conversation every chance I found. It was the same routine as when I taught myself Hebrew shortly after moving to Israel, determined to impress Dita’s Sabra husband.
Try to stop me!

I did it. At twenty-two, I landed the job of my dreams, and I was very good at it. I greeted distinguished visitors from all over the world, confidently guiding them to travel resources and answering all their questions. Though the tourist office was not a travel agency, I occasionally assisted tourists with their itineraries and accompanied private tourist agencies all over Israel, rating their performance and the sites of interest they chose. The Israeli Government Tourist Information Office wanted to make sure that the agencies they recommended were maintaining the highest standards in the industry, after all. I truly loved the eminence of my job—sitting across my desk from tourists as they
smoked their American cigarettes, troubleshooting their complaints, helping them schedule sightseeing destinations. I felt worldly and sophisticated in such a multifaceted role, and the tourists responded very favorably to me. It was enthralling.

I was the envy of many of my friends, of course. I was single and in charge of my own life—exactly what I had intended for myself all along. I answered only to myself, and life was good. I was still living at home with my parents at the time, so with reduced living expenses I allowed myself some luxuries, in particular the services of my own private tailor. Now that I had a place to wear clothes that supported my sophisticated self-image, I wanted to be “dressed for success.” My stride was purposeful and confident, energized with the pride of accomplishment. Never mind my friends with their husbands, I thought. Walking the blocks to work in my new clothes and with a sense of importance, I was on top of the world.

On the other hand, my married friends—not to mention my own parents—worried very much about me. By their definition of success for a woman my age, I was way behind the curve and beginning to appear
hopelessly lost. I was in the prime of my youth and attractiveness (though I’d never been the kind people considered pretty). It was high time for me to meet a decent man, get married, and begin a family of my own. My friends became very protective, failing to understand the kind of life I had chosen to lead. They wanted to help me find Mr. Right—and soon. I had been dating casually, of course, but not with any serious sense of purpose or urgency. To them it must have appeared that I never intended to settle down.

I’ve often found in my life that others around me simply can’t get on board with my ambitions. I’m too eclectic, too selfish, too progressive, too “unheard of” for the times. Let them judge, I say. It’s for me to define what success will look like as I chart the course of my future. Had I complied with others’ expectations, I might have easily married a well-to-do gentleman and settled into a comfortable life there in Tel Aviv. My family and friends would have said I did very well for myself.

But I wouldn’t have. Getting married and withdrawing from professional employment in my early twenties would have been an unacceptable concession to
arbitrary social pressures. It would have been my own personal kind of failure.

I’ve learned that there is a price for ambition. Independence comes with consequences. Both require a healthy sense of pride and a stubborn, even obstinate, indifference to others’ opinions. I’ve also come to realize that success and failure are largely self-defined. Looking back on those formative years of my young adulthood, when I aggressively began exploring my newfound self-determination, there may have been some times when I was a bit naive. But I’m glad that I didn’t let others decide what success would look like for me.