I woke up this morning in a very cranky mood. Not being able to find a concrete reason for it, I attempted to shrug it off, following my morning routine as I normally do, but then I sat down and checked my work assignments.
Oh. That thing. That thing that’s giving me stress since I’m being a perfectionist about it. In this particular area of work, the thing that I need to do is something that 100% will not be perfect the first time, nor the fifth, and will require a group discussion or three to get it all right. The point of my task is to put something down for the team to work with. All at once, I realized I was acting one way on the outside, and in the privacy of my own home, I was finally beginning to express my inner feelings about it.
One of the many positive things about self-awareness is learning to observe yourself when you’re not feeling comfortable. I have to be more curious and look a little closer, because my life experience taught me to omit or reserve negative emotions — even hiding that which causes me to feel poorly — in order to maintain peace with those around me, even with myself. Self-awareness combined with rigorous honesty has allowed me to simply listen to myself as I move from one thing to the next and pick up on the cues that reveal what the root cause is for my negative feelings.
This thing — something I’ve a significant amount of experience with — has somehow managed to push me into a cycle of creeping guilt, growing pressure, exaggerated responsibility, higher than normal expectations, and a feeling of being obligated to make it so pristine on the first draft that literally no person on the face of the planet could ever wish to change from the first draft. It becomes so overwhelming that I quit working on it before I even start clacking at my mechanical keyboard.
Another thing about self-awareness (and therapy, let’s be honest) is that I know all five of these notions can be performative — not for others, but for yourself. You’ve started to perform guilt out of the false pretense that it’s empathy. You’ve begun to embrace pressure because it feels like motivation since it makes things harder. You create an unnecessarily large sense of responsibility since it makes you feel more dependable. You raise your personal expectations much higher than your normal bar since it makes you feel ambitious. You feel more obligated because it makes you feel like you are being loyal to your sense of accomplishment or even your team. And you will be damned if anyone’s going to talk you out of hanging onto these completely superfluous notions as if your life depended on it.
What do these performative notions really do?
-Guilt – causes overwhelm
-Pressure – causes overwhelm
-Responsibility – causes overwhelm
-Expectations – causes overwhelm
-Obligation – causes overwhelm
Ruh-roh Raggy — are we about to burn ourselves out?
Even with the danger of burnout, these notions become a hill upon which we choose to die, often without even realizing it, all in the name of making ourselves feel loftier than we need to be. These are the pearls we clutch as we essentially play the role of social justice warrior to ourselves, defending our need to feel better at the expense of offending ourselves in the most underhanded way possible.
Letting go is not an easy act, but the moment you apply grace to yourself, you begin to loosen the grip enough to realize you’ve invented some gnarly looking beads to latch onto. How do we do that, exactly?
- Recognize these performative efforts for what they are, separating the performance from the values you already possess.
- Give yourself permission to not be bigger than yourself. Center yourself in your freshly permitted state.
- Appreciate yourself for what you are. You’re here and now, and none of the performance you’re acting on did not get you here.
- Take time to listen to what you need in the moment (keep it simple: a cup of tea, perhaps?) and nurture yourself.
- Now that you’ve given yourself a break and some grace, you should be feeling refreshed and ready to get back to it.
We do not need to validate ourselves, especially to ourselves. It’s like George Orwell wrote: “…how can you call yourself a true tea-lover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it?” How can you practice self-love by adding to what’s already complete? Enter Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Radical self-love is recognizing that we are already perfect, that what we consider flaws are indeed aspects of our perfected selves. We are valid with the tickets we already hold, not the vicious pearls we create and adorn for ourselves. Not with the sugar we keep adding, not with the pressure and guilt and expectation and obligation and responsibility.
In the spirit of an inside joke shared between myself and my recovery folks, a dressed-up trashcan is still a trash can. Not that we’re trash, but the object serves the same purpose, regardless how nice it looks. Appreciate your purpose without the pomp and circumstance. And above all else, don’t take yourself so seriously!
Relax, friends, you got this! You always have!