Not Perfect
Today is December 31, 2020 - and yet, in my post last week, I wrote that it was going to be my last post of 2020.
This might not seem like a big deal, but when I found out that I’d done this, I instantly felt ashamed. I wondered if I should write a new post immediately and ask to switch that post with the one that ended up getting posted last week, so I wouldn’t be lying. But in the grand scheme of things, I wasn’t worried about lying - I was worried about making a mistake.
As a child, my perfectionism - a common comorbidity with OCD - took the form of wanting to get straight A’s in school. This meant everything from taking notes “perfectly” - including rigid rules about things like skipping lines, using bullet points, and using both sides of certain kinds of paper - to worrying during a test itself, if I didn’t know an answer, how that particular question would affect my score. My standards were so exacting that I saw a B as a failure, any feedback about improvement was insulting, and yet, somehow, it worked.
At least until I got to geometry, that is. It was seventh grade when I encountered the first class I struggled with to a large degree, where I was getting actual failing grades on quizzes and tests. I had no idea what to do with myself - I’d never made mistakes like that before. None of my coping mechanisms worked either - it’s not like I could suddenly write on a different kind of graph paper and understand the formulas and shapes.
I ended up going to a tutor for geometry, a decision that I doubted a lot before I even went to the first session. I thought that, by admitting I couldn’t be perfect on my own, I was a failure. After all, I didn’t just want to succeed - I wanted to get the same straight A’s that I did in my other classes, with the same methods I always knew. Anything less than that was not only a failure in school, it was a failure for me as a person. These “all or nothing” thoughts that I later learned about in CBT quickly faded when my grades improved drastically as a result of the tutoring.
Thankfully, I found 8th grade algebra easier, and by the time I got to high school, I was getting better with the idea of an occasional B. I thought everything would be okay from then on, but as I started taking harder classes, I ended up using my old methods of taking notes obsessively (writing every word I heard in class until my hand cramped many times a day, keeping meticulously organized binders and folders that had to be done a certain way or I would get upset, etc.). It worked again for a while, and I thought my perfectionism was what guided me to passing AP exams.
And then, AP Calculus appeared.
For the first time since I took geometry, I was failing a class - and this time, it was much worse. I always tried to stay on top of any negative thoughts by telling myself that I could do badly on one quiz or test and still get a good grade in the overall class, but I failed the first eight or nine quizzes. When I decided to try tutoring again, I showed up at the tutor’s house with a dejected look on my face and told her that I was so confused I didn’t even know what to ask her about first.
She stayed calm, even when I couldn’t, and she told me I had to reframe the way I was thinking about my grade in the class. I couldn’t expect to be perfect at everything, and complicated math is a place where I may not be as strong. She showed me how to be proud of getting a D on a quiz, then a C, then a B. I think I still have the first quiz I got an A on somewhere in the house, because it meant so much more to me than an A that I had earned more easily.
While the tutoring helped a lot, my grade was saved in the end by a project requiring more creative skills than math (something I wonder if my teacher put there to help kids like me who were having a much harder time with the actual tests). When I took the AP exam, I stressed myself out so much that by the time I left the building, my mom said I was white as a sheet. Somehow (divine intervention is the likeliest explanation, in my mind), I passed the exam - not with a perfect score, but enough to not have to take any more calculus in college.
I haven’t studied math since AP Calculus in 11th grade, but its lessons carried onward. In college, I caught myself trying to be too much of a perfectionist about grades and things. I learned very important lessons - including the time I got a B- on a paper, but I was so proud of that grade because that was my first paper in all my years of academia where I wrote something that I saw no evidence had ever been written before. I didn’t mind a B anymore like I used to, except in one specific circumstance where an A was the only way to gain honors in a special class (which I didn’t, a failure I still blame myself for, although thankfully much less than I did at the time).
After I got my master’s degree and left school for good, it became harder for me to be a perfectionist. Sure, I could organize things in my house, but that didn’t speak to me as a person. Nothing I do is getting graded anymore, so it’s up to me to come up with standards for what I feel is successful.
I still do some things “perfectly.” I would never commit to National Novel Writing Month and not finish the 50,000 words in one month - in fact, I completed for the tenth year in a row this year. At my job, I turn in my work early and am always eager for praise. But, without being graded, it feels weird to have perfectionistic impulses and nothing to do with them.
They come out at times like this, when I made a simple mistake and didn’t realize that the 31st was a Thursday. This post is my actual last post of 2020, and one of my last posts before my 2-year anniversary of blogging for No Shame On U. When looking at the big picture, it doesn’t really matter that last week, I said it was my last post of 2020. I don’t need to listen to that impulse to “fix” things and try to regain control. Instead, I need to listen to what my calculus tutor said and listen to what really matters - the fact that the world didn’t end because I made a mistake, and I can move on.
Right now, I’m feeling proud that I’m not beating myself up over this tiny mistake I made. I’m sure that if anyone who read last week’s post realized my mistake, they only thought about it for a second, and it didn’t diminish their opinion of me as a person. After all, what matters most is that I put forth my best effort, whatever the results. It’s hard to accept that, and I’m definitely not perfect at accepting my own flaws - but hopefully in 2021 and years to come, I will make it to the point where my perfectionism is a thing of the past.
Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.