I’m addicted to perfection
Perfection is a fickle thing.
The United States is built on the idea that success will give you everything you need in life; want that white picket fence? Work hard. Want a mansion inside of it? Work harder.
If you’re anything like me and grew up in the suburbs of one of the big cities in the US, you were likely bred young to get good grades, excel in as many extracurriculars as you could, take advanced courses in high school, have a flourishing social life, go to prom, get accepted to the best universities, and on and on until 10 years have passed and you’re burning yourself into the ground at a corporate job you don’t even like.
When I look back on my life, I realize that I’ve made so many decisions because I knew I was signing up for a challenge and I wanted to push myself.
AP Differential Equations? It’s the toughest course offered in the school, so you bet I’m taking it.
Pre-med? Yeah, sure, I’ve heard it’s impossible so watch me do it.
Moving into Sales? It’s high visibility and I’ll make good money if I do it well…sounds like a plan.
You may read that first statement and think, Pushing yourself is a good thing. It’s important to chase things that seem out of reach throughout your life so you can get what you want!
That’s not the kind of “pushing” I’m talking about, here. I have never listened to what my gut is telling me is the best decision for myself at that time. I consistently override my gut reaction in favor of the option that will make me the most successful, regardless of whether or not I’m even interested in or excited by that option.
Then, once I choose that intentionally challenging option, I sprint at it as fast and as hard as I can like an offensive lineman running at a sled during practice. I’ve fused perfection with success (and vice versa). To be successful means to be perfect, and to be perfect means to be successful.
But what happens when you’re sitting at a desk surrounded by your successes and encased in a life that you’ve filled with rules and regulations ensuring that everything gets done perfectly, but you feel unsatisfied, exhausted, and physically sick from burn out? Do you pretend that nothing’s wrong, or find something else that you could improve or be successful at in the hopes of solving your problems?
Probably, because that’s what society tells us to do.
If something is wrong, there’s something to fix. Something to improve, something to work on, something to change or do a better job at. So you continue down your steamrolling perfection path for a couple more years until you’re chronically ill.
Maybe you’re like me, and you’ve developed an eating disorder, an autoimmune disease, and your boyfriend and family members are getting fed up with all of the rules you’ve put into place in your life.
And maybe, just maybe, you decide that it really is time for a change. You stop looking at self-compassion as weakness, and you realize that you could benefit from a little more of it in your life. You start by writing down all of the areas in your life that you’re actively trying to perfect, and then you write down all of the things you’re missing out on, and all of the relationships you’re straining, and the harm you’re causing to your body because you’re living like this.
Next, you ask yourself why you feel the need to be good at every single thing you do, and why you only feel successful if someone is telling you that you’ve done a great job.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll realize that you’ve never truly felt proud of yourself before. You’ve never been able to count on yourself to provide validation, you need to get it from those around you…you need to hear their praise in order to feel valuable.
Self-value and self-love are deeply intertwined. If you don’t love yourself just for being a human being alive on planet Earth, it’s really hard to feel like a valuable person. And if you don’t feel valuable on your own, you probably start to find ways at an early age to feel valued by others.
If you’re anything like me, you build that feedback loop until you’re so addicted to positive feedback because it’s the only thing telling you that you’re doing great, really really great, and you need to hear that because if you’d don’t then how do you know you deserve to be here? How do you know you’re worthy of love? How do you know you’re valuable?
Perfection is a fickle thing.
It’s highly addictive, highly unstable, and more than anything, it’s something we use as a band-aid solution to feel the love we can’t generate for ourselves.
I’m addicted to perfection
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