Whose Perfection Am I Chasing?
Alyssa Lui’s words opened yet another door into my mind last week.
Did you read her interview?
She spoke these words about her joy as she returned to skating, on her terms.
“ I don’t feel like my life is on the line anymore.”
That may sound flippant to some. After all, it’s only a skating competition, not brain surgery. Right?
Yet, in my life, and certainly in today’s world, those words are one of the most right between the eyes insights I’ve had in a while.
How often do you feel like you’re fighting for your life?
Maybe it’s fearful thoughts about losing your current job, lifestyle, freedom. You have to be perfect in all those meetings and presentations.
Or perhaps you’re questioning what kind of lives your kids are going to live given the state of our world? The guilt and anxiety can be overwhelming.
Then there are so many of us wondering what the hell is going to happen next that puts your neighbors and friends at the wrong end of a masked man with a gun? Talk about feeling threatened.
Most of us don’t know it, but we’re triggered into constant survival mind by the world around us right now. More so than ever.
Well, not all of us. Those doing the triggering are enjoying their power with swagger and a sense of glory.
When Survival Mind Rules
That drive to perfection is triggered by our survival mind.
What I call Survival Mind is technically known as our fight-or-flight response, also known as the acute stress response.
Survival mind is triggered by both real and potential threats. You don’t have to be experiencing a real threat. The potential for a threat is enough to trigger a response. Like reading that news headline and then the next and the next and wondering why your stomach is dropping and your heart is pounding. Survival mind!
A threat, or appearance of threat, causes the unconscious mind to trigger physiological reactions, which then trigger the nervous system. Every single fabric of your body is on autopilot now, focused on protecting you. Which. By the way, is not a healthy place for your body to be.
When survival is triggered, our minds go into high alert. We continuously search for any immediate or potential threat around us. We continue to do just that far longer than our body remains on alert.
Over time, with enough triggers, we just stay on high alert.
Which pretty much sums up how many of us are living in our modern world. With threats and potential attacks digitally beamed into our minds, every single minute of every single day.
When survival mind runs the show, we stop trusting ourselves. We constantly look outside for rules, for whatever means we might find to stay safe. Specifically, What do THEY want? What will keep THEM from attacking?
We become externally driven because that’s where the threat lives. The threat essentially becomes our master.
Which is why Alyssa’s comeback in pure joy and wonder is so motivational and so mind blowing to me. In the world of high pressure skating, surrounded by our insanity-driven world, she found her own special self. And only herself.
Freedom From the World at Large
I watched her final skate with joy as she brought my heart along with her. I knew her story. I sadly watched her walk away from the sport. I felt her agony so deeply then. Her broken self and heart, overwhelming her joy and talent.
Her Olympic skates changed all of that, for her. She also opened a new door in my mind. A door that has crystalized an oh so powerful layer of mind programming that I thought I fully understood. I thought I’d healed.
I didn’t.
I’ve lived my entire life driving for perfection and was never ever good enough. No matter what I accomplished. No matter how high the highs, a roller coaster of lowest of lows followed.
My friends just shook their heads and watched, trying to slow me down.
The stress made me sick for random periods of time, just to catch a break from myself. The popular comparison among friends and associates who cared was that I was like a nuclear sub, full speed ahead or dead in the water. I laughed at them, ignored them and just kept on my quest for perfection. Never realizing that they were oh so close to my truth.
That drive for perfection, and my stress from perceived failing, accumulated over the years. My immune system was made non-existent. I gathered toxins and bugs like wildflowers. Until they literally took control of my body. Which is another story.
My perfection was imprinted early and deeply in my childhood. I was a tortured child. Complete with a dank, horror-filled cellar and two sickly programmed humans, doing sick shit to me that others had done before them for generations past.
I forgot the entire mess, completely, for the first half of my life. That’s what kids do, I’ve learned.
The programming stayed with me. Especially the perfection part.
They only attacked me when I wasn’t perfect. Their definition of perfect, that is.
I realize now that even their pattern of abuse was designed to keep me in their clutches.
My little girl mind created a strong belief that perfection was her path to survival, to safety.
A way to not die. The only way.
That foundational belief/program shaped my life for decades after.
I uncovered my drive to perfection, and its source, a number of years ago. I started giving myself grace, consciously stopping myself when I decided to be perfect. Like waking up at 2am and having to get up and go into my office to finish some client work due the following week. So I could be perfect.
For the last year, I’ve caught myself every time I hear myself saying “I HAVE TO.” I’ve pivoted and stopped myself from acting. That was a biggie.
The more attention I paid to when and how that voice appeared, the more I learned I “had to” about pretty much everything in my life. Every moment was driven to do and be and focus on being perfect.
I made my definition of perfect far more extreme than theirs. Nothing I could ever do was perfect enough to keep me safe, to prevent my potential death that was around every corner.
I thought I’d healed that. Until I watched Alyssa skate, felt her pure joy. And later read her words.
That’s when it hit me.
I wasn’t chasing MY perfection, I was chasing THEIRS.
Please Love Me, Or At Least Like Me?
As I read her words, a deep place in my soul lit up. The idea of being free from not just perfection, but fear for my life, shone a new light on my mind and my beliefs.
I started playing back tapes of my life, as an advanced tech consultant, as a friend, as an athlete, as a kid after the torture stopped, as a woman with friends and questionable taste in men, as a pianist competing far above my age level. Interestingly enough, I quit playing because of that very stress. At least some part of me rebelled against the perfection pressure.
As I played back the tapes, something I’d noticed again and again, but never really dived into, came front and center.
All of my life, I’ve been driven by external forces. Others opinions can send me running back for a redo at the slightest comment. When I create, I focus on what my audience will want to read, not what I want to say. When I used to show my horse, a few people were just plain nasty to me. Welcome to horse girls, right? I lost my joy to the constant stress of those nasty comments, lost my skill when I walked in that arena because of the pressure to be perfect for them.
Professionally, I became what my clients wanted. The Rebel with no fear. Taking on projects none else would even think of trying, fixing broken companies that should have been let die long ago. Fighting battles for the right and just in the middle of a Silicon Valley that didn’t care.
In my perfection, I lowered my value, I lowered my perceptions and I became the rebel I was never meant to be.
Everything about me has been driven by external forces. From the mean girls and then nasty women in my life, to the jealous and threatened men who wanted me to be far less.
I did become less, still successful, but so much less than I was meant to be. I mourn that now, even as I rise to be my true Rebel self.
I did some fundamental mind reshaping after my “how could I have missed that” discovery. Using the powerful mind shaping methods I’ve learned and created over the past decade, I reshaped my perfection yet again.
Today, I’m reborn into my own skin. And only my own skin.
Opinions of others? They are now feedback that can be taken or jettisoned. Water off my back baby.
Were You Programmed to Perfection?
I think most women are programmed toward perfection.
From the way we dress, do our hair, put on makeup, to how skinny we can make ourselves, the world is all about telling us how to look. How to fit in. We look at the magazine models and feel anything less than perfect. And we find ourselves lacking.
From the way we speak to when we speak and how much we speak. If we’re aggressive and out-spoken we’re bitches. Believe me, not my first or last rodeo. The world is designed to put us in our place, to teach us to mind our words and our thoughts. We have bold ideas and fresh insights, yet when we speak up, we’re put down. Back into our place of silence.
From how we work to how much we take care of our family to whether or how we put our husbands or kids or parents or friends before us. Some would say be a 1940s wife and mother and damn the career, stop thinking and stay in the kitchen where you belong. The guilt for women who step out of that pressure is beyond measure. We love and give to them all, oh so much. Can’t we love and give to ourselves as well?
Perfection is programmed into all of us. We live with it in our minds every day. Hear the voices nagging at us that we’re selfish or ungrateful or stepping out of lines. See the disapproving looks as we shine brightly in a meeting or play or simply in the joy of our lives.
My advice to you? Ignore it. Listen to that voice that you know is your truth. Inside you, not in the judgemental and controlling world. Then focus on that voice and that voice only. Imprint it again and again as your truth.
Constantly tell your mind that you are worthy to be you, that who you’ve become is on her own unique and oh so perfect path.
Focus inward. Listen to your voice, trust it and follow its guidance. Find your joy and let the rest of the world be as it will be.
Btw. On the other side of my mindshaping, I’m playing again. Not the hairy shit I played oh so young. I can’t even read that music. At first that really upset me. Made me feel imperfect. Now I laugh at the fact I can’t even read those 10 note chords and 5 scale glissandos. I’m proud that I once did, and today, I’m proud that I’m simply loving my music.
I’m playing beautiful melodies that make my heart, and the world around me, sing with joy. No more hairy concertos with so many notes and those full keyboard glissandos that make my head reel and my hands cramp.
Beautiful jazz , simpler music with singing melodies, beauty that I was never allowed to play as my classical talents were honed.
At first it was hard, like the 15 other times I’ve tried to play again. This is different. This time I did it for ME. No more them and their classical challenges.
Today, I play for joy, for the beauty that Kassandra, my grand piano, sings into the rafters of my home. For the imperfections and missed notes and the learning of new types of music.
I’m so grateful for reclaiming the sheer joy of doing something I love. Something I had learned to hate so much that I simply walked away, for far too many years.
Thank you Alyssa. For that and so much more.
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