Words by Jia Xuan Chok
“First, achievement-striving people hate to fail, so they escalate their commitment, hoping to forestall failure. Second, achievement-striving individuals appear more susceptible to hindsight bias, perhaps because they have a need to justify their actions.”
-from Organizational Behavior Seventeenth Edition by Stephen P. Robins and Timothy A. Judge-
I was one of those achievement-striving people, always in a race with myself. My parents would say I have always been the only supporter in this one-man race because they have never put pressure on me. “You cry and worry so much because you put too much pressure on yourself,” they asserted, time and time again. But it was the seemingly insignificant remarks and comparisons they made that gave me the impression that I needed to excel at everything in order to stand out in each and every comparison they made. Explicit validation protected my fragile self-esteem.
On the other hand, there was also the pressure to make the family proud as the eldest daughter and to be the model student because that was my image – it was part of my role to constantly appear as though I had my shit together. An internal battle raged but I was too hung up on trying to fulfill people’s expectations of me to be conscious about it.
I’ve always kept a journal, and I still do. On top of writing about my crush, I also used it to tally all the mistakes I made, the goals I failed to achieve, and the statuses I failed to maintain, like saying the wrong answer in front of the whole class, not receiving that grade I worked so hard for, not being able to help my parents reconcile after a fight, and a number of other issues that no longer bother me as much. I wanted to be everything and took every problem as my own. I set goals that were too high only to hate myself when I couldn’t achieve them. I simply couldn’t bear the thought of being bad at anything.
I was obsessed with flawlessness and put too much focus on the result but not enough on the process. Because I was always so easily battered by minor mistakes, I unconsciously formed habits of self-sabotage and negative self-talk. I let one failure define my self-worth and never had the courage to step out of my comfort zone because judgment from people was my greatest fear. I would cry over my mistakes, afraid that the perfect image of myself would be tarnished because I had always been told that blundering equals incompetency. I didn’t realize that competency was something you could nurture.
Perfectionism did, in a sense, help me get what I wanted, but every success I achieved became a flimsy disguise of my incompetence because I only cared about how things appeared on the surface. I feared that I would just expose myself as a fraud. I had an ambition of becoming a vet because I adore animals. But when it came time to choose between the natural science and social science clusters as my primary study area for senior high, I opted for the latter because I’ve always scored higher in history, geography and all the language subjects compared to chemistry, biology, and physics. It wasn’t that my grades were bad; I just knew that joining the science cluster meant that my GPA would become highly dependent on all the subjects I wasn’t confident in scoring well. I chose the social science cluster just so that I could maintain my outstanding academic record and position as one of the top students in class. Instead of pursuing my dream, I chose to preserve my self-esteem.
“Things outside you are projections of what’s inside you, and what’s inside you is a projection of what’s outside. So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you’re stepping into the labyrinth inside.”
-from Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakam (my favorite book since 19)-
I can’t recall exactly when or how it happened, but I believe that the positive influences in my life—the affirmations on my social media pages, the optimistic people I spent time with, and the numerous self-help books my dad gave me as I entered adulthood—helped me get out of the toxic mindset. Slowly, I became someone who sought to emulate the positive traits of others instead of feeling inadequate for not being as good as them. Those who were unbothered, carefree—those who put themselves out there—were the kids I envied the most in high school. They prioritized their own needs rather than what others thought of them. Those people were the ones who learned the most, and those people made me think differently about perfectionism. Even when they made mistakes, they were never discouraged to try again. That was something I wanted to practice.
Shedding perfectionism made me realize that beating myself up for making mistakes and allowing that negativity to brew doesn’t bring me any closer to perfection; it merely saps me of the motivation and mental strength to become better. In truth, there is no place to “arrive to” because you are forever growing into a better version of yourself and you will never be satisfied. The only end place in your life is death. The fear of failure will only reinforce low self-esteem and shut out doors for introspection because every time you turn down an opportunity to step out of your comfort zone, you’re reinforcing the idea that you aren’t capable of doing what you wanted to do rather than trying to find a way to become capable.
One mistake is not representative of your life as a whole. People don’t care if you make mistakes because everyone has their own lives to worry about. If you don’t believe it, try to recall one time someone made an insignificant blunder. See, it really doesn’t matter.
Toxic perfectionism still gets to me sometimes but it’s important to know that healing is not linear. It’s a curve.
p/s: You don’t have to be everything to everyone. Let the past be the past.
The Polyphony 