You're Not Being Graded
How the pursuit of perfection sets you up to fail
Last month, I landed in Fort Lauderdale. The humidity took my breath away, replacing the emptied air in my lungs with a damp, clinging mist. It was exactly like the scene in Home Alone 2 where the McCallisters, piled like sardines in an airport shuttle, putter up to a motel, giving off steam under (what I now understand to be) a typical Floridian downpour - neon palm tree sign flickering in the gale. Their faces resemble a collective reenactment of The Scream painting.
I was there for a girls' trip with close friends (notably not Taylor - although my penchant for accidentally being in close proximity to her is getting wild!). Our kitschy bungalow was sprawling and full of as much charm as pool towels and light switches (read: plentiful). But all weekend long, I couldn’t shake a certain, eerie feeling. A fly buzzing in my ear. The dangling foot on a stair when you expect another tread but come up against air. A wrongness. An offness. I felt like I was standing over my body, an astral projection of my most judgmental self, and I wondered why I was so weird and awkward and unfunny.
For those three days, I felt like I was always saying the wrong thing. My jokes weren’t landing. My observations were trite. I’d blurt out the wrong fact or say something that charged the air in our rental car with an uncomfortable, soundless static. I felt alien in my own body and my own brain.
It’s possible my friends, in the off chance they do read this (friendship vanity subscriptions are nice - even if not every word is read, I promise!) - have their foreheads crinkled in confusion and are trying to place my feelings against what they experienced. But I know that my flight home to Vancouver was a montage of all my perceived worst moments. I stared at the back of the seat in front of me, projecting a movie of my own making onto the blank in-flight entertainment screen with all the things I said or didn’t say, did or didn’t do. I sat. I stewed. I let the feeling of self-hatred fill me up and fizz over. Carbonated by my own cringe.
What I’m trying to recognize is that I’ve felt this way for a long time.
What I’m trying to rectify is that I don’t need to anymore.
Who hasn’t stared up at the popcorn texture of their ceiling, tortured by something they regret saying five years prior in a passing conversation? If you can’t relate - please share your secrets.
I’ve tidied up around the house before a cleaning service is due to come over.
I’ve listened to and memorized a band’s setlist before a concert.
I’ve thought through agenda topics before I have a session with my therapist.
I’ve studied a restaurant’s menu before my scheduled reservation.
In all aspects of my life, I have tried to be a good student. I want to excel. I want to be given the gold star, the perfect score, the pat on the head. I want to get an “A” in life. A totally realistic and normal thing to want.
“My entire moral code, as a kid and now, is a need to be thought of as good. My belief system that I subscribed to as a kid: Do the right thing. Do the good thing … The main thing that I always tried to be was a good girl.
Those pats on the head were all I lived for.
I was so fulfilled by approval that I became the person who everyone wanted me to be.”
- Taylor Swift, Miss Americana, 2020
I suspect I’ve always been this way and that every person has natural, varying degrees of perfectionist tendencies. But I also think society conditioned me to see grading myself as a good thing ...
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