Many people perceive rejection or failure, while painful, a necessary component of life, which in the long term allows for growth. I am not one of those people. Some of my earliest memories are vivid pangs of embarrassment when I would answer a question wrong in class or break a classroom rule. I distinctly remember being forced to sit on the bench during recess one day as a punishment for forgetting to bring a book to class. Sitting here, as a twenty-year-old, I am still ashamed of this error. It may sound crazy to some people who can barely remember what they ate yesterday, but for those who feel that perfection is the only option, these memories beat on your mind as a constant reminder of failure.
I still don’t understand my incessant need for perfection and the obsession over my real or perceived failures. My childhood memories of spelling a word wrong or tripping in gym class drove me to strive for complete perfection in high school. I tried to be the best student and was infuriated that I just seemed to fall short of being at the top of the class. Even when I was inducted into the Cum Laude Society, I still felt disappointed as I knew I could never be valedictorian. Beyond my perceived academic failures, I obsessed over my social life, wanting to be popular, pretty, skinny, and everything in-between that I believed would make me perfect. Just as with my academic career, I felt disappointed with my social life. Even when I became friends with the so-called popular people in my grade, I still felt inadequate. I would brutally attack myself for not being as thin as them or as pretty as them or as wild as them. This is the problem with perfectionism: your achievements mean nothing, and your failures mean everything. I spend hours thinking over the one question I got wrong on an exam, wondering what if I only had said something different to someone would they have accepted me?
My drive to be perfect has left me completely imperfect, and in many cases, it has driven me in the complete opposite direction of my goals. This desire has left me so insecure that it is difficult for me to develop relationships out of fear that who I am isn’t good enough for people, it has left me studying into the middle of the night only to sleep through class the next day.
Recently I faced one of the biggest rejections I’ve had in a long time. This rejection, in particular, felt like a personal attack on my core-being. I didn’t know how to handle it, and the tower of perfectionism I have spent twenty-years building up tumbled down… crushing me. I felt lost in a world where everyone around me seemed to accept themselves, while I was stuck tearing myself down. I spent a few weeks wallowing in feelings of disappointment, which left me at a crossroads. Do I leave college and go home to cocoon myself in sadness and pain, or do I stay and accept the failure? For one of the first times in my life, I decided to accept the failure. There was no way of manipulating the situation in my favor. The situation sucked, and I had to deal with it. This rejection has pushed me to new limits, for not only have I had to feel its sting, but I have had to find a way to move past it. In the process of moving past it, I have accepted that if I live the rest of my life wanting to be perfect then I will miss my entire life. I will miss all the amazing moments I’ve had and will have because I can’t see that they are amazing. I will miss seeing that sometimes failures and mistakes are actually not failures or mistakes at all.
While I am still in the beginning stages of accepting my imperfections, I know that these imperfections are what makes me who I am, and that trying to be perfect all these years is what has left me lost.