I don’t know why I didn’t write on this blog for a while. I guess I was just afraid of saying imperfect stuff. Which is why I started looking up more books about embracing imperfection and uncovering the roots of perfectionism because I am starting to wonder if my perfectionist tendencies are actually even healthy or just maladaptive. Today I bought a book for my Kindle called The Anxious Perfectionist: How to Manage Perfectionism-Driven Anxiety Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy by Clarissa W. Ong, Ph.D. and Michael P. Twohig, Ph.D. and I am just taking it in. Even though I haven’t yet done the exercises at the beginning of the book, there was one exercise where I had to list three self-critical labels or stories I believe to be true about myself and pick the label I grappled with the longest and reflect on the earliest memory of having this self-critical label or story I believed about myself. I have been chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo (it’s a Buddhist practice I do every morning and evening) for clarity about my life, and as I have been on my journey with mental health and therapy, I have been reflecting on a pretty huge narrative I have told myself throughout my life: “I am worthless.” This self-critical label has been the story I have carried with me for a long time, and it is connected very much to my struggles with perfectionism, depression and lack of self-confidence. I was really young when I first had this thought of being worthless. I had always been a sensitive person and a creative person, and I had gone to public school for the first time when I was in fifth grade, and it was a huge adjustment for me. I felt like I just was falling so far behind the other students in class, and there was a program for gifted and talented kids but I wasn’t part of that program and I began to think that somehow I wasn’t smart. I would often fall behind in my schoolwork and started to think that somehow every mistake or failure I made was a character flaw. I have always been an introvert, and when my math teacher told me I had to stay inside instead of going to recess like the other kids, I just shrugged and said I was fine with staying behind to complete my schoolwork. If three-year-old me can treat time out like it’s the best time in the world to catch up on some reading, then clearly ten-year-old me can treat time away from recess to catch up on some schoolwork. However, this rubbed the teacher the wrong way and she ended up pulling me aside for a good thirty minutes to an hour talking about how it wasn’t okay for me to have a nonchalant attitude about missing recess to finish my homework. Looking back I can understand she just wanted me to have fun at recess and not make this a habit of missing homework deadlines, but at the time because I was so sensitive I started to think that maybe something was wrong with me for having a carefree attitude about missing recess.
I also started to wonder if maybe being sensitive was too much as well. I remember being in the lunch line and saying “hi” to one of my classmates, and she asked me why I said “hi” to everyone. I thought it was perfectly normal to say “hi” to everyone, but apparently not in this new environment. I started comparing myself to the other kids, thinking that they couldn’t possibly be going through the same battles of dwindling self-confidence I was going through. Of course, now that I am older and have read more and gone through more life experiences, I have realized in retrospect that those kids I thought were confident on the outside may not have been so confident on the inside. Then again, I wouldn’t know because at the time I didn’t have the language to talk about self-love and self-worth in a healthy, life-affirming way, but I’m pretty sure those kids weren’t immune to dealing with problems in their daily lives. I mean, come on, we’re fifth graders. Our brains haven’t fully developed yet, and we’re all battling our own insecurities (this was back in the early 2000s; I’m sure pretty similar challenges with self-esteem still happen today even if we have more spaces to discuss it). I remember always struggling with math and science and feeling like I wasn’t cut out for those subjects, and instead of just joking about it, it really hurt me that I wasn’t making progress in those subjects. At the time I was doing Kumon math and doing Kumon helped me gain a lot of self-confidence in my math skills, but when I tried to bring that same self-confidence about math to my 5th grade math class, I pretty much fell flat. I thankfully patched things up with my teacher a couple years after that, but every time I talk about perfectionism and failure I think getting at the root of why I continued this behavior pattern was pretty important. I’m not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, so I can’t really diagnose myself, but I just think a lot about how I still battle negative self-talk and I decided to just go back to my past when I actually started saying a lot of those negative things about myself (e.g. “I’m worthless”, “I’m ugly”, “I’m stupid”, “I’m fat”, etc.)
I guess this is why have hobbies and interests outside of my studies during that time helped. When I was struggling with low self-esteem I had an outlet: art. I loved art, painting, drawing, doodling, you name it. Even when I wasn’t supposed to be doodling in class I drew Powerpuff Girls cartoons and other stuff. However, I think I lost a lot of confidence in my art at some point and wondered if it was even the right avenue for me. Teachers are a pretty key influence on a kid’s mind, and so I’m glad I had a cool teacher in middle school who encouraged me to keep making art. He encouraged me to enter my art in a contest and I think I won (I got a bag of Fritos as my prize, and as a dedicated follower of The Holy Church of Fritos, I was in heaven.) He was a mentor to me during that time, and looking back I really appreciate how he shaped my perspective on why I make art. When I got to advanced placement (AP) art I felt like a total imposter. I was so used to drawing images from magazines and free-drawing cartoons that when the art teacher told us we could not sketch images from copyrighted images that scared the living shit out of me. God, I really am an imposter, I thought, so I met with my counselor, told her I was having second thoughts about being good enough for AP art, and high-tailed my ass out of that class. My parents had bought me all these hell-expensive art supplies and I felt terrible that they had pretty much gone to waste. I still have those paints from the class; I sadly threw out the canvas board because I just didn’t know where else to put it. I hope I can gain the courage to keep making art even if it’s just for an inner sense of fulfillment. I guess that is why joining orchestra and Whiz Quiz my first year of middle school helped, because I was sensitive and had drawn into myself because of those deep insecurities I had felt about my personality. Doing hobbies helped me build my self-confidence back up again.
Oh, gosh, I am tired and it is midnight. But I couldn’t wait the next day to write this. I just felt like something was missing when I realized how much I missed writing even if just to feel an inner sense of fulfillment. I hope to be more consistent with writing. I thought I would need to wait until I had completed editing my review of The Crown series that I’m watching, but something in me was like, Just write.
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