“Why didn’t you do better?”
“Why couldn’t you hit that goal?”
“It wasn’t that hard.”
These are the statements that constantly run through my mind every time I do anything — even if it’s a simple task.
If my goal was to run the mile in eight minutes what I really mean is that it better be under eight minutes.
If I want my Odyssey team to tier at 45,000 views what I actually want is to hit at least 46,000 views.
Living life as a perfectionist makes it feel as though nothing is ever good enough — as though I'm never good enough.
The anxiety I feel when I get an assignment back from a professor is almost enough to make me want to pass out, and an 89 percent is my worst enemy.
I begin to think about everything I could have done, should have done and would have done differently if I had the chance to press a redo button.
“Would I have used that particular sentence?”
“Should I have pushed myself to run even faster?”
“Was my headline strong enough?”
Missing or not hitting a personal goal is a tough pill to swallow, and even if I know that it was already a big accomplishment to get that close to my goal — it just isn’t enough.
Being almost there isn’t what is going to help me become a Senior Content Strategist at a major company down the line in my career.
I lose sleep over it, waking up in the middle of the night feeling as though the world is closing in on me — as though no matter what progress I continue to make that it will never compensate for that one time I failed.
For that time I felt less than — for the time I failed myself and everyone around me.
Living as a perfectionist makes it challenging to love myself and to appreciate my accomplishments because even if you I that deep down they are, in fact, accomplishments I can’t seem to push that to the forefront of my mind.
This feeling eats me alive until I can’t feel anything anymore, I just feel numb and motionless. Distraught, but not doing anything about it because I feel so helpless.
I begin to worry about what everyone else will think — I begin to wonder about how you let them down, which only adds to my pain.
It feels as though everything is really just a shout into the void as my perfectionism turns into anxiety, as every “what if” begins to come to the surface and the only thing I think there is left to do is to feel as though I'm drowning.
As hard as it is to take that step back, though, when I begin to realize that I may not have hit my personal goal, I did hit a goal, and any goal, no matter how big or small, is an accomplishment.
