Has anyone ever managed to stop being a perfectionist?
I spent my teenage years being obsessed with getting perfection in my studies. I wanted 100% on everything and anything less was unacceptable to me. I’ve always been competitive and from around year 8 age I decided I had to be the best at everything I did (no idea where I got this from, my family are not like this at all and never put any pressure on me). I used to study for 10 hours a day at the weekend and on holidays and 5+ hours after coming home from school. I would stop for dinner and go straight back to learning, and I don’t mean sitting on my phone or procrastinating, I would be sitting studying for hours on end, almost compulsively. The thing that motivated me was that I felt like such a failure because my exam average was around 96% and in my mind it HAD to be 100. I only ever got As and I received multiple awards at school and I remember nearly throwing up on the night of the school awards as I felt like such a failure and my one aim was 100% in everything and it was another academic year where I didn’t achieve it. I didn’t want to go on stage and put on a smile and acted happy but inside my head I was devastated and felt like I had let everyone down. The happiest day of my life was getting 100% in one of my history tests, I felt like I wasn’t a failure (until I got 86% on a test the following week and went back to feeling like a failure again!)
Everyone used to say how lucky my family were that I was studious and didn’t need to be told to study but they were stressed about how stressed I was and would have preferred I had the lowest marks in the year if it meant I was happier and wasn’t putting so much pressure on myself.
This continued until I was about 18 and my brain ended up completely fried with the pressure of it all. I took some time out to relax and recharge the batteries and stopped bothering about always getting 100% and I returned to further education when I wasn’t putting so much pressure on myself anymore, and now hold a job I really enjoy. I’m not a perfectionist anymore (hence all the typos and spelling mistakes!!!) but I feel like I still have the tendency to want everything to be perfect and right and it can’t always be so. It’s just little things- when I’m washing the dishes they have to be spotless or it annoys me. When doing my hair it has to be exactly the way I want it and if there’s a single hair out of place I have to sort it. It sounds trivial but it’s annoying sometimes. It’s funny because I don’t hold others to such ridiculous standards and I know nobody is perfect, and if my friend washed the dishes for me and left a little bit of food on it I wouldn’t be bothered because it’s no big deal! But when it’s me I feel annoyed at myself!
I’ll make sure I never go back to how much of a perfectionist I used to be (thankfully!), and If I got 75% on an exam tomorrow I would be genuinely over the moon but I feel like I’ll always have the tendency to put pressure on and be tough on myself.
Why did I turn out as such a perfectionist as a teenager? Nobody in my family was pushy and if I had brought home a report of Cs and Ds they would have been equally delighted as with As, so they never fed into it or made me feel like I had to get 100%. Is it just my personality type? I used to be competitive and (honestly this is not meant as a humblebrag) but I was the child who won everything and was top of everything, and then one day my brain just broke and I went from being competitive to being compulsive. I did spend time with my friends too and get to be a normal teenager, but I feel sad that I made myself miss out on a lot of good memories because I was so obsessed with studying.
Just posting if anyone else has perfectionist tendencies and how they learned to accept that not everything will be perfect?