In class this past week, a girl was presenting her essay and as a class we were giving her feedback. She continually used a very passive voice, especially when talking about the theoretical texts that she was using in her essay. She claimed it was because she was afraid of misrepresenting the theorists. My professor looked at her, and then said that she needs to be confident and to not worry about failing.

I may be a feminist, but there is still the fact that I see this primarily in women. I do have one male cisgendered friend who does experience the need of perfection, he sometimes thinks that he is not good enough because his muscles aren’t big enough. Besides this outlier, I know very few other males who are so hung up on this perfection.

Even I was like this. I worried about handing in papers that weren’t perfect, or bumming out in public. I’d be writing, think it’s shit, and delete it because it wasn’t good enough. I stopped drawing for a long time because I would compare myself to others.

One of my residents is the same. She draws for fun, but if it isn’t perfect, she will toss the whole drawing, no matter how elegant it is.

I didn’t start to loosen up until I started painting more like Leonid Afremov, a loose style focused on color.

Even after I adopted more of this style, this anxiety washes over me when I need to present something that isn’t perfect.

The week before finals week, I had to present a video that I had created. While editing this video, my laptop had crashed several times, I had edited the film halfway and it was corrupted. The audio wouldn’t show up on the computer. The programs would lag. Everything was against me finishing this project. Luckily, I had a friend who was good at editing who could help me. I personally didn’t like what she did with it, because it wasn’t me doing it. It wasn’t my idea, my vision, my dream. The audio still wasn’t showing up, and I had to display this work that I despised to a class of my peers. The horror was overwhelming, and receiving feedback on items I had no control over made me cringe to the point where I wanted to shrink inside my sweatshirt. It was the only presentation that I have ever tried to hide from.

I had seen this Ted Talk a couple years ago, “Teach Girls Bravery, Not Perfection” with Reshma Saujani. Within the talk, she speaks of a program designed to teach girls how to code. The girls would ask for help, saying they don’t understand how to code. The teacher would come over and see an empty screen. She would undo a little and see a page full of script, but the girls didn’t want to show that they were wrong. They would rather not have anything than be wrong. This video is about 12.30 minutes long. If you have the time, watch it.

There are points that are raised that we need to bring to discussion. Why do we, women, need to be perfect, refusing to accept failure or any risks?

We need to start breaking this stigma that girls need to be perfect. We need to accept our fault and go with what we have. We are human, just like any male. We are human.