Reflections of an insecure overachiever: learning to live beyond achievement

For as long as I can remember, I’ve linked achievement with identity. At school, I chased grades. At university, I pushed myself to the limits. Success became my sense of self – a way to stay safe, stay seen, stay in control. I was always afraid that if I stopped achieving, I’d disappear.

This mindset followed me into my legal career. Coming from a comprehensive school in Reading, I saw the Magic Circle as a symbol of having ‘made it’. The glittering offices, the designer suits, the skyline views that made everything feel possible. But once inside, something shifted. My worth was no longer measured by exam results but by billing targets, quarterly appraisals, and relentless comparison. I was no longer one of the best. In fact, I felt like one of the least capable – less talented, less resilient, constantly struggling to keep up.

The difference between high achievers and insecure overachievers is that high achievers are driven by passion, purpose or curiosity – while insecure overachievers are driven by fear of failure and a constant need to prove their worth. Because I was an insecure overachiever, my sense of self was built entirely on external validation and achievement – so when those were stripped away, the whole house of cards collapsed.

I burnt out – not all at once, but gradually, painfully. I began self-medicating with alcohol and prescription medication, trying to silence the exhaustion and emotional pain I couldn’t make sense of. The anxiety became constant – a tightness in my chest, a racing heart, the sense that something terrible was about to happen even when everything looked fine on the surface. I had panic attacks in the office toilets, crying silently in a cubicle before going back to my desk and replying to emails like nothing had happened. I stopped sleeping properly. My thoughts became darker, more hopeless. I began experiencing periods of deep depression, and there were times when I didn’t want to be alive. I didn’t tell anyone. I thought it would pass. Instead, it got worse.

I ended up in a psychiatric hospital. And though it wasn’t the place I imagined I’d be in my early thirties, it became the first place I began to ask myself: Who am I, without achievement?

I took 24 books into the psychiatric hospital and desperately scribed every single thing I learnt or overheard. I filled notebooks with insights from group therapy, staff conversations, and diagrams of the autonomic nervous system. An art therapist once asked me gently if I could put the pen down and just be present. A nurse questioned whether it was healthy to pore over so many books.

But this is the hallmark of an insecure overachiever. If I wasn’t intellectualising the experience – turning it into something productive, useful, valuable – then the time felt wasted. And if the time had no value, then I had no value.

Leaving law didn’t magically fix everything. In many ways, it unravelled me even further. Without the structure, the title, the prestige – I no longer knew who I was. My identity had been so deeply tied to my output and my status that once those were gone, I felt weightless in all the worst ways. I drifted for a long time, trying on new identities, clinging to anything that might offer a sense of purpose or control. There were false starts, rock bottoms, long stretches of numbness.

But gradually – through recovery, therapy, community, and a painful kind of honesty – I began to build something new. Something quieter. Gentler. I started writing – about law, about mental health, about the unspoken pressures that shape so many of our lives. I began to explore the parts of myself I’d ignored for years. Slowly, I learned to stop seeing rest as failure. To stop measuring my worth by how much I could produce in a day. And perhaps most importantly, I started to challenge the deeply ingrained belief that I had to earn my right to exist.