Overcoming Perfectionism
She had always been striving to be 100% - to be more than just enough. This had been going on all her life. In elementary school, the importance of getting all those A's, being the teacher's pet, always getting the gold star. In high school, being smart, being popular, being good at sports. Whichever path she chose to fit into, there was always the need to be the best. She always needed to excel. Wanted to be the perfect child. Not to even mention the pressure to be the perfect parent and to have the house with the white picket fence.
She had memories from her childhood and young adult years - she remembered people having hobbies, doing things they enjoyed with no value system attached. Whether it was painting, knitting, writing poetry of making furniture in the garage, the point of doing these things was the joy. She didn't remember a whole lot of apologies being made about how something wasn't up to some pre-defined set of standards. The end product might have wound up on a prominent wall or it might have stayed hidden in the garage. The point was the experience, not the outcome.
Somewhere along her early life journey there was a change in values - the bar had been set so high that it became impossible to just let life take its course. In some recess of her mind she could not just simply enjoy her life as she had chosen to use each activity she pursued on any given day as a defining point of who she was. Her attempts at artwork were never good enough to hang in an art gallery so she lost the joy of just putting paint on a canvas and having fun; her dyed Easter eggs were a bit amateurish and the color a bit blurry; her poetry made sense to her but others with whom she shared her work didn't understand her thoughts or words. She never seemed to be able to score as many baskets in the basketball game at school; her down hill ski runs were never as good as were those with whom she skied; her high jumping heights could have been higher.....and, as her life moved on she continued to pursue each and every day striving for perfection. The pie crust was never flakey enough, the Christmas turkey could have been a little less dry; her attempts at writing never seemed to be good enough to win a contest and/or good enough to be published. No matter what she attempted, it was never good enough. She was not enough. Instead of feeling the fun of pursuing something she liked to do, she used everything as a scale of her own value, so each time something fell short of her personal benchmark, in her mind it was actually her falling short of being perfect.
Through life's lessons she has now become aware that through her need to be perfect she had shut herself off from a wealth of joy, of fun, of pure pleasure. Now, if each pursuit is no longer a review of her personal worth, her world can open up. She can detach from the outcome, She can even start a project and not feel that she needs to finish it and what a freedom filling concept that is. Life can be simple - no 1st place ribbons needed! She has learned now that she is okay - perfect in her imperfection - and it is okay to be average, even to be below average sometimes. It is okay to just be. She now revels in the comfort of mediocrity. She now seeks joy as her end result and the path that gets her there is irrelevant. She now makes no apologies for a cake with a sunken layer - it's just a cake after all.
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