i am gee.ky
Melissa Sconyers is an uber geek who is obsessed with technology, search engines, start-ups, and China.
http://gee.ky/
THE PRESSURES OF PERFECT
The pressures of perfectionism may lead to high-achievement motivation or may just as easily lead to the problems of underachievement. The pressures children feel to be perfect may originate from extreme praise they hear from the adults in their environment. They may also come from watching their parents who model perfectionistic characteristics, or they may stem from their own continuously successful experiences which they then feel they must live up to. It is only slightly different than the motivation for excellence. That small dissimilarity prevents these children from ever feeling good enough about themselves and precludes their taking risks when they fear the results will not be perfect. They avoid and procrastinate and feel anxious when they fear they cannot be good enough. They may experience stomachaches, headaches, and depression when they make mistakes or perform less well than their perfectionistic expectations.
So what I want to say to you today is this: if this sounds, in any way, familiar to you, if you have been trying to be perfect in one way or another, too, then make today, when for a moment there are no more grades to be gotten, classmates to be met, terrain to be scouted, positioning to be arranged—make today the day to put down the backpack. Trying to be perfect may be sort of inevitable for people like us, who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and in its good opinion. But at one level it’s too hard, and at another, it’s too cheap and easy. Because it really requires you mainly to read the zeitgeist of wherever and whenever you happen to be, and to assume the masks necessary to be the best of whatever the zeitgeist dictates or requires. Those requirements shapeshift, sure, but when you’re clever you can read them and do the imitation required.
But nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations. The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
This is more difficult, because there is no zeitgeist to read, no template to follow, no mask to wear. Set aside what your friends expect, what your parents demand, what your acquaintances require. Set aside the messages this culture sends, through its advertising, its entertainment, its disdain and its disapproval, about how you should behave.
Set aside the old traditional notion of female as nurturer and male as leader; set aside, too, the new traditional notions of female as superwoman and male as oppressor. Begin with that most terrifying of all things, a clean slate. Then look, every day, at the choices you are making, and when you ask yourself why you are making them, find this answer: for me, for me. Because they are who and what I am, and mean to be.
