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I want to preface this by saying I am doing well mentally and emotionally.
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I’ve lost a lot of years of my life to perfectionism. I’ve lost beautiful moments to rumination. I am not writing this from a “healed” pov, but a place of heightened awareness after many moons of reflection.
I think about the little girl who used to have one hand to her mouth and the other to her hair, and i realize now how self-soothing and nervous that was. I was just a child. I used to look at that photo— one of the few baby photos I really even have — and think it was cute. now I look at it and I feel sad for her.
Since I was a child, I had always struggled to meet the demands of adults around me. I was always late, never organized enough, and a bit too talkative or loud. I had internalized it all. mulling over and replaying the moments of rejection I felt, making it my adult mission to please, to say yes, to fill the void of rejection with good work reviews and better grades, and ultimately making a job out of being called beautiful.
I see now how sick I allowed myself to become. I worked myself to the bone (quite literally when I stopped eating properly in 2018), and sought the ‘best’ degree of ‘self’ i could find. I allowed perfection to consume me… only the qualifying factor of perfection never belonged to me. I spent most of my life giving that away.
before the year ends, I want to share some things I’ve learned— both the things that I’ve spent most of my life learning, and the other things that I one day woke up and felt healed from. none of it came without the very deep, messy inner-work. when I say “woke up” feeling healed, I mean to shine light on how non-linear this process has been.
I want to shine a light on how beautiful it has become.
