Perfectionish

I feel like I’ve been messing up a lot lately. At work, in personal relationships, in my day to day life, I just feel like I’ve let go of the reins of my own existence a little bit. I’m sleeping through alarms, running late to everything, forgetting borrowed belongings and get-togethers and promises, and it doesn’t feel good. I’m a perfectionist-wannabe against my will. Everything in me wants everything I touch to be orderly and sunshiney and picture-perfect and detailed, like the Midas x Marie Kondo collaboration that no one asked for. It’s the nightmare anxiety disorders are made of. I just can’t hack it. I have the want but not the will. I spend hours scrolling through TikToks of people organizing the items in their fridge by color. I watch their Container Store memberships make good as the mountain of depression dishes cackles in my sink. I’ve been listening to podcasts and Ted Talks about motivation and confidence. I've read so many of Brene Brown’s words that I think I’m starting to take on her commanding Texan drawl, but they just hit the stone-cold wall in front of my heart. They strike hard enough to feel something for a moment but not long enough to make a breakthrough. I find myself begging for a validation that no one owes me, that I really need to just be giving myself. To say the very least, I’ve been very lost in my own head, drowning in a river of tears and anxiety, and floating on the promise that everything ends. 

I have always been a person who lives for sharing with the class. I’m a gold star secret keeper until it’s my secret to keep. I am an open book of trauma and anxiety and messiness and way too many very specific opinions warped with the passing of time and sun-damage, full of margin notes, and barely holding onto my binding. When I’m going through something and have no idea what to do, I will ask 15 people and then sit with their words forever, unsure if I trust that my ears heard them right, if there’s something to read between the lines, or if I have the courage to do anything for myself. I have piles of helpful feedback, a long list of people who were so willing to listen to my stories 5, 10, even 50 times, and shelves of words that may have been hard to hear but definitely needed to be said. Gratefully, I am not short on good, true, and honest friends in my life. I have spent pre-teen lifetimes begging for something to stick, for the courage to leave my chrysalis, for the gasoline to put fire to the words I need to say, but I’m finding it’s not the walls of the house that are taking a hit. I very much like the person I am, something I thought would never have been possible. However, when the slipping silt of self-doubt and self-hatred is drifting underneath me, it feels easier to yell, “timber!” and give in to the fall. Sure, I like me, but I don’t know if I love me, and I certainly don’t respect me.

When I want a retreat from my thoughts, I scroll frivolously through the mind-numbing embodiment of fluorescent lighting that is social media. Since quarantine, I have tried to be more intentional about using my social spaces. I try often to discover artists and activists who use their platforms to inform, uplift and amplify voices that may get lost in the digital shuffle. On top of the support it supplies to those who might truly deserve it, the ways this has helped make my life more breathable are numerous. It’s not the perfect solution to my addiction of hiding from myself, but it’s one light turned off. I share a lot of self-help-y art, words to live and learn by that I know a past or current me would need and someone else may find their own truth in. At the beginning of this most recent spiral, I was avoiding the claustrophobia of being surrounded by my most recent failings by doing what I, a millennial, do best: Finding memes on Instagram. With my eyes burning and my body heavy laying on my couch, I stared blankly at the screen, scrolling in rhythm to the soundtrack of my own self-loathing: “You’re lazy. Your friends only pity you. You’re too gross to look good in that. You will never get past this.Your feelings are silly.” (A casual Monday night for someone with severe anxiety and depression.) Taking a deep breath to expel the unhelpful and unkind thoughts from my head, I tried to refocus on the screen. I saw the recurring text of one of my favorite uplifting accounts, and read, 

“Replace, ‘Life is against me.’ with ‘Life happens for me, not to me,’” 

Now, I’ve heard this same idea before. I could and have belittled ideas like this with the thought that it’s just the same old, cheesy, self-help bullshit that I have plastered my life in. I may be a fan of positive outward thinking and encouragement, but even “self-help” is an industry now. I’m not blind to the “ick factor” or, sometimes, lack of sincerity it has, but I like to fight my inner kill joy and find the good in most things. When I really tried to think these words through, I realized that I really had no sense of what they even meant. In no way was I letting any part of life happen. What I had tried to believe was ‘grounding myself” was actually just me being stuck. What I had held onto as “organization” or “keeping it together” was unmovable fear and anxious control. The silt I was built on began to slide with the tide of unpredictable life, pulling me down into a suffocating, organic glue that had no room for oxygen. The house that should be cover from the storm became an insurance company's dream, battered and broken, feeling more like kindling than a home. I had spent my life grasping so tightly to what I thought life was supposed to look like that my knuckles were white from trying not to slip away from it, and my arms felt like they were full of pins and needles, bound to give out at any second. Was what I was doing even considered  “living”? Was it worth it to feel like the tin man: tensed for life, unable to know where my shoulders were supposed to settle on my body and afraid to loosen my jaw in order to say what I felt? What if I was bad and broken and lazy and ugly and selfish? What if I had let myself follow so much that I couldn’t even trust my brain and my heart to lead me toward goodness and care? Am I being dramatic? Am I too much? Why am I going from 0-60 over an inspirational post on Instagram? Have I just completely lost it?

In the aftermath of my panic attack, as the dust of the avalanche cleared and the crashing around me faded from an echo to just a ringing in my ear, I numbly dragged myself to bed. No answers, just an emptiness that I knew would be simple enough to lull me to a tensed night of sleep. I thought to myself, 

“Fighting you is exhausting.” 

And, dammit, it really was. I was so overwhelmed by just trying to live and worn out from having to hold on to a person who didn’t even want me there. If I wouldn’t even send myself an invite to the party, why should I expect anyone else to? The depth of this feeling was so far beyond loss, it was numbness and emptiness, like nothing has ever existed there at all. I didn’t even know where to begin, if there was a beginning. How do you go for a hike in the void? It’s one of those moments of mental illness where the bird you are hits that deceitful window called, “Something's Got to Give.” I wanted to be my best self for my friends, for my family, for my job, which seems like a noble intention…but if my whole life is for others, what self do I have to keep at its best? I realized that, as much as I love and need these people, as deeply as I felt the only thing that seemed worthy of my time was being a martyr for them, they are not living in this body or brain. No one had asked me to be this, to hollow myself in order for them to live fully filled lives. I was suffocating in the dirt thrown by my own shovel, buried in the grave I dug. (How masochistic of me.) If there is no me, who do I have to give to those I love and the things I revere when it matters most? What I cherish most now about perfectionism is its impossibility. 

So maybe letting go of the reins a little bit isn’t so bad, in fact, maybe sometimes it’s important. Life is not a game to play or a maze to navigate. I can walk the path and not know where it goes, and maybe I’ll be ok…or maybe I won’t. Not every path is for me, not every moment is good or productive. Sometimes life is messy, failure is inevitable, it’s important. We don’t spoil like apples, we aren’t irreparable. Even when one person or group or space or idea isn’t for us, it just means we haven’t found the piece that finishes the puzzle, and even placing the last piece won’t let you see past the picture frame. There will always be more to the story, things I am not privileged to know as I am often the character and not the narrator. Even when I can’t trust in the unknown, I put hope into it, and I think I can get by like that. 

-Mary