sleepy girl battles perfectionism

This blog post was supposed to be about healing perfectionism and being comfortable with rest. But honestly before we get in to anything, I need to say that I’ve just found out that Roe. V Wade has been overturned by the Supreme Court. I have many feelings about this, mostly fear. I’m still processing it, I’m heartbroken, and I want you to know that there is space for you to be angry and afraid here. You can hide here until you’re ready to look at the world. I’m here with you. Contact me if needed, there is an infinite amount of space for all of our feelings in my inbox. I don’t have anything uplifting to say about this today. I just want to acknowledge it. Some day soon I will take action, right now I am choosing to mourn.

Prepare for the most ironic contrast ever, I wrote this before my reproductive rights were taken away.

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I am the happiest I’ve ever been, and the most sleepy. I didn’t think those two things were meant to coexist. In the past, when I’ve been overcome with sleepiness and a lack of motivation, depression and anxiety surely was the driving force. But for the first time in my life, I am resting. This was a scary endeavor, and one that I actually didn’t plan for. I was actually ushered in to it by a painful series of wake up calls and shut downs. Last semester, my body completely gave out. I struggle sometimes with perfectionism and over working myself. Throughout my life, I didn’t feel worthy of good experiences or a positive sense of self esteem if I wasn't making the perfect grades, taking the hardest classes, being the most involved, doing the absolute most. I have always been really driven, but that can become detrimental to your mental health when that drive comes from the wrong place. I had no idea how to fail and recover. If something went wrong, I’d shut down completely. My mind would go amuck if I didn’t make the grade I wanted, or if I underperformed in my extra curriculars, or if I made any type of mistakes. This mindset led me down a destructive path headed straight for burn out. And when it happened, it happened. Last semester I went through a lot of crazy, heartbreaking, confusing, and painful shit. But I also remained very involved in school and aimed to get perfect grades, not letting my personal feelings show up in a way that made me look like I was struggling. I had this huge fear that if I had less than As on my transcript that it would mean that I was weak and let life get in the way of my success. I figured I would forget all the hardships if I just kept working. I thought, “I’m sure one day I will forget how bad I feel, and I’ll be able to look back and be proud of myself for pushing through anyways”. I carried this narrative until the very end. I finished the year with all A’s. When I type that it doesn’t feel exciting, it feels relieving. Thank god I pulled it together, right? No.

I began seeing a therapist again after some time away from counseling. I had been keeping it together for as long as I could, but I just collapsed under the weight of my accumulated sadness and confusion. I didn’t feel like myself for a long time, and the only part of my identity that I knew how to nourish and protect were the parts that I felt were “perfect”. Sure, I was crying every day, struggling to eat enough, dissociating around friends, waking up sick with anxiety each morning, feeling so exhausted I couldn’t do basic things. But, I was gonna be on the Dean’s List. I found my current therapist in the midst of this. I’ve had many therapist, none quite like this one. We will call her Sharon.

Sharon was the first person to inform me that I was worthy of things like happiness and peace, even if I made mistakes or took a break. Crazy! When I first starting seeing her, I immediately informed her of all the strategies I was using to support my mental wellness. “I go to the gym a few times a week, I do meditation, I sometimes write out my feelings, I try to socialize X amount of times throughout the week, I try to eat three meals a day (I struggled with this greatly), I do Art Therapy on myself and have a journal of my illustrated psyche, I listen to affirmations on repeat, I try to stay on top of my academics (I would cry before most classes and barely had the energy to walk across campus), I’ve done multiple modalities of therapy…none of it is really working, but I’m trying!”. Sharon asked me about my involvement in school, to which I responded with my memorized resume. She was taken back. I was used to this reaction. Usually, I got the “Wow, you’re really involved! That’s so impressive, what don’t you do?”. I always took that as a compliment. But then something unusual happened. Sharon didn't stroke my ego. Sharon actually wasn’t concerned with what I could do and what I had accomplished. This was weird for me. If I wasn’t being seen for my work ethic and accomplishments, what could she see in me? “Well, Skyler. It seems like you have a strong urgency to improve yourself. You must be really struggling”. What the fuck?

Sharon is the type of therapist to make a serious face when I try to laugh through difficult emotions. The first time I tried that, she said “I notice you’re really uncomfortable sitting in your sadness. You’re laughing, but you don’t have to”. She immediately identified that I was using a strong front as a coping mechanism for something deep within me that was highly distressing. The self help agenda I pushed myself in to, the extra work I took on, the grades I would force myself to obtain. I thought all of that was self love. Turns out, it was the exact opposite.

If you don’t love the parts of yourself that need the most nourishment and attention, the parts that are “broken” or “imperfect”, you aren’t really loving all of yourself. You love parts of yourself. I loved the parts of myself that everyone could count on, that always came through, that never stayed down for long, that always rose to expectations, that was closest to my idea of “perfection”. And honestly, it was the meanest thing I’ve ever done to myself.

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I am studying to be a teacher, and in my last Education course, we learned about assessments and grading. We learned about things like assessment reliability and validity, and some of the external factors that can affect the grades students get. In previous classes, I also learned that grades don’t exactly correlate to intelligence, and that every student learns differently. We learned to differentiate lessons and how to apply the Universal Design for Learning, and learned ways to identify students’ needs, natural interests, and personal academic challenges in a way that fosters a growth mindset. We learned the impact of writing letter grades in red ink across a student’s work, or drawing smiley faces on their tests with no additional feedback. We learned that students need detailed information and responses to the work they spend time completing. Writing a simple A+ on an assignment isn’t enough. Neither is writing a simple F. Students deserve feedback and grace on the work they complete, to help them gain knowledge and true confidence in regards to what they are learning. Once children believe they can’t get better or be more challenged by something, they fall in to a fixed mindset. It is very hard to learn, grow, and extend compassion to yourself and others from this headspace. Through my education, I have a fundamental understanding that our academic performance should never be the defining quality of students, nor should it undermine a person’s ability to learn and grow. Grades give us information, not the whole story.

The more I learned about this, the more passionate I grew about busting out of the chains of perfectionism. I will never minimize my students to the grades they receive, so I will not be doing that to myself. Through therapy, I am continuously learning to deconstruct my relationship between academics and self worth.

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Sharon once explained accomplishment to me in a way that I had never thought of it before. She said, “Accomplishing things is reaching achievement. When you pass a class, you accomplished something. You’ve done what you needed to do to get to the next thing”. I sat in silence and shock for a moment. Was she insinuating that all my hard work was for nothing, that an A didn’t mean anything? She said, “Making a grade that gets you on to the next thing, that’s accomplishment. Rather that’s a higher level class or a diploma. You can get those things just by passing, even if you don’t earn an A. Passing is a great thing, that is accomplishment”. I was floored. I had been on autopilot, seldom giving myself grace when I needed it the most. I didn’t know how to be proud of myself for accomplishing things, not unless I did them perfectly. I didn’t realize you could set your own level of accomplishment. Actually, I did know that, but I didn’t know how to be comfortable without setting my self standard as “high” as possible. I explained to Sharon my way of thinking. “I think of my future as a dart board. What if I don’t hit the bulls eye? I don’t know what I’d do. So I just throw handfuls of darts at the board until it’s completely covered. If you do everything, you can’t miss out on anything. If I want to have a successful future, I have to keep throwing darts”. To me, making an A wasn’t just about mastering academic material. To me, making an A was directly tied to my sense of worth. If I got below the highest mark, then that meant I was a failure. I thought that if you failed, then you let yourself down. And if you let yourself down, you must not love yourself. This problematic and unhealthy way of thinking wired my brain to be on autopilot. I felt almost robotic. Sure, I was sobbing while writing essays. But I wrote them in the perfect format, made every point I could, and followed the rubrics I was given intensely. I would have to fall in to a different headspace to get things done. This emotional contrast between my depression/anxiety with my perfectionism was absolutely exhausting. It got to the point where I didn’t want to go to class. I couldn’t pay attention because my thoughts were so loud. I was always on the verge of tears. I didn’t have the energy to leave my bed. And would a perfectionist skip class? No. Who was I becoming? I had to ask for accommodations, for more time to complete assignments and projects. I had to send email after email explaining how I felt ill and couldn’t come in. I began to laugh blankly around friends, completely checking out. All I knew how to be was a student. But I didn’t realize how much more there was to me. There was so much that deserved to be nurtured during that time.

I am creative and sensitive and analytical and funny and insightful and compassionate and loving and I love arts and crafts and I love taking slow walks and I love looking at trees and I love putting my hands in rivers and I love hugging the people I love. And a lot of other things. I am so much more than a machine who can write good essays and do well on tests.

I had a friend (Hi, Kierra! I love you.) say to me in fall semester that I was a perfectionist. I laughed at the time. It was an art class, Drawing, and we had this quiz. We had the option to take it twice if we got below a C on it the first time. I procrastinated studying for it (something quite common, ironically, for perfectionists). So when I had the quiz in front of me, I felt really anxious. I had learned all this stuff before, I knew the answers were somewhere within me. I felt unprepared, but I knew I wasn’t going to fail. I had gotten used to that feeling. Lived for it, actually. No matter how bad a situation was, I knew I would come out on top. There didn’t seem to be any other option really. I think I could have gotten a C on that quiz, but I wasn’t sure and the idea of that scared me. So, I turned in a mostly blank quiz, and took a failing grade. This meant that I’d have the chance to retake it. Instead of trusting myself to prepare for a quiz, trying my best, and accepting whatever came of that, I took a different path. Procrastinate, sabotage, try again until perfect. I chose the path of suffering. Because it was what I was used to. I could have gotten a fine grade without suffering, but that never felt right. Later after class, I told my friends that I had sabotaged the quiz. The same friend who first noticed my perfectionism spoke up again! “Girl, it is just a quiz!”. She didn’t say this in a condensing way, but in a reassuring way. It wasn’t like, “Get over it, this isn’t a big deal”. It was more like, “This is a quiz, not a measurement of your worth”. One time during a critique in this same class, I made a comment about how I didn’t like my final piece or something about how it wasn’t good enough. And this same friend told me, “Your work is fine, I notice you start to sabotage yourself and be really self-critical when you think your work isn’t perfect”. She also said something similar when I was turning in my final portfolio. I was nervous for hours about what grade I would get. I had cried on the phone with my advisor, I had spent hours re-documenting and editing work, I basically memorized the rubric. When I got to class I told Kierra how worried I was, that I didn't know if I’d make an A. I didn't think my work was good enough, and I didn’t feel like my portfolio looked perfect. I knew what she was going to say. During that class I got my grade for the portfolio. I got an A. I sighed with relief and told my friend. She said, “See! You worried for nothing!”. I smiled and laughed and felt happy. But the thing is, her entire statement resonated in a way I didn’t realize. I’ve worried for nothing. Not, all my hard work was pointless and I shouldn’t have been so stressed. Not, See! You always pull through, great job. It was simply, you have destroyed yourself for something that, compared to your immense and immeasurable worth, is beyond miniscule. What if I had enjoyed making all of my projects, documented them with pride, and submitted them in to my portfolio. And what if I had still made an A, and what if I didn’t? Would a grade less than an A change anything about my beautiful, personal, and creative art? No. I love how I create artistic concepts. I am always proud of my artist’s statements. I love sharing my work with my peers, even if it’s still developing. I love art. In art school, sometimes your love for art isn’t the most important, but rather your ability to create based on rubrics and prompts, as well as your application of critique feedback (which you receive all. the. time.). People outside of the art realm don’t always understand that being an art student is sometimes a sacrifice for creative people. As creatives, we are naturally inclined to let our minds run free and we alchemize our thoughts and experiences in to things other people can perceive. It is incredibly vulnerable work, and as students this vulnerability is sometimes associated with your academic performance. Many times, it will require you to bring your most fragile parts out in front of a room of strangers. The challenge of art school is keeping a passion for your work, while constantly subjecting it to criticism. Art school is not about getting a pat on the back for your creativity. It’s about pushing your mind further and further until you can think of something original, yet personal. And we are all just human, and there are very few original experiences. Creativity isn’t just a tool for art, it is a goal we must reach as artists. So, based on those terms and conditions, if a professor looked at my work and decided it was not A material, how much would that truly matter? Was I not a good artist if another artist didn’t think my art was good? Most of the artist we’re forced to learn about were hated during their time, their work criticized, mocked, hidden away. Hell, I look at some historic art and think “That’s ugly as hell”, but that ugly ass art has been preserved for decades and now I know countless facts about it. What I’m getting at, is that similarly to creativity, there is actually no standard for perfection. Perfection actually does not exist. A life spent trying to appeal to something that does not exist or really matter, is a life spent bypassing the opportunity to experience the beautiful realities of our existence. Part of being human is trial and error, making mistakes, laughing deeply, loving endlessly, creating just for fun, and doing what feels good. And we’re all just human. What a shame it would be to despise and neglect the very things that makes us who we are.

So, where am I today? In bed! I applied for multiple summer internships, made a list of things I wanted to study for the summer, planned out the art I needed to make. And y’all, I am in bed. I have spent this summer taking my meds, sleeping, talking with my therapist about literally any thought that enters my brain, eating delicious things, laughing with my friends, free style rapping in public with said friends, looking at the trees, and falling in love. Many of these things are immense privileges in our world. Everyone deserves to get the care that they need and have time to look at the trees.

As I fell in to my era of hibernation, leisure, and marathon mistake making, I felt lost. What the hell am I doing? I told Sharon one time that I had made “minuscule and almost unrecognizable progress” in regards to something. And she heard me out, laughed, and told me, “That’s pretty big stuff to me. I don’t think any of this is minuscule, and I can see your progress”. So, I don’t like to downplay shit anymore. Y'all! I am resting every day, and learning to love myself when I can do nothing but exist! I am discovering that my worth is in no way tied to what I can do, what I have accomplished, or any future success I may obtain! This is big stuff, and it looks like laying under my fuzzy blanket and watching Real Housewives of Atlanta. Perfect is not a destination I’m interested in getting to anymore. But self-compassion, acceptance, inner peace, balance, and joy. Now, those are worth the work. Even if that work means no work at all.

This summer I am hibernating. And when I have the energy, I’m finding a grassy meadow and laying in the sun. Exactly as I am. Because right now, I need to rest. And I’m pretty damn good at that.

I love you, please take a nap and delete Blackboard off your phone,

Skyler

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I’m so glad I’ve been hibernating because I need absolutely all the energy within me to fight against the patriarchy in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. I’m resting right now, but I am not quitting. I know I’m tired of it, which is why today, I rest.