If you’re a type A, high strung perfectionist, the chances are that you tear yourself down a lot. When things that I can’t control go the wrong way, I immediately blame myself for it. While I’ve always done this, last week I had an experience that brought it to light. As EIC of my school’s Odyssey community, I have a responsibility to ensure that my team has a certain amount of creators and a certain number of articles go live every week.

Last week was the first week of spring semester and let me tell you, I was at my breaking point.

So many of my creators left my team because with a new semester comes a new schedule, and sometimes it’s hard to fit extracurricular activities in. I get it. However, in the moment, I felt like I was failing my team. I didn’t understand what I could do to retain writers and produce all the content I needed for the week.

Then I took a deep breath and thought rationally. It’s not my fault. In fact, it’s actually kind of ridiculous for me to assume that all these writers left my team in the first week of classes because I was a bad EIC. Logically, I knew this. However, sometimes I can’t help but blame myself. I second guess everything I do and sometimes I’m insecure. No one can be perfect, but the perfectionist inside me freaks the heck out when something goes awry.

Relationships are the same way. Whenever a friend or my boyfriend is acting off, I have a tendency to believe that I did something to upset them. However, in reality, people have a lot more going on in their lives than being my friend or boyfriend. Instead of focusing on what I'm doing wrong, I should be focusing on how to make that person feel better.

If you’re like me, you probably know that feeling a little too well.

However, not everything that goes wrong is your fault.

I mean, come on, it can’t all be your fault because I know a lot of things are my fault. Anyways, if you constantly blame yourself, you might not actually be getting to the root of the problem. So push your ego aside and find a solution. Perhaps you do need to change, but perhaps you’re looking in all the wrong places. The more you obsess over what you might possibly be doing wrong, the less you focus on what you could be doing right.