I was indoctrinated into the society of perfectionism at an early age. Fun fact: being a tiny human and having all your power stripped away often morphs into perfectionism because you need to control SOMETHING. Clothes, grades, the way people perceive you … If I can make this all beautiful and perfect I will be worth something. People praise the perfectionist, which unknowingly reinforces their belief their worth is tied to what they can produce and how the world receives them.
How are you really? If anyone had asked me that I probably would have stood dumbfounded. How am I? Look at all the things I did! I have stellar grades, I lost the weight, I discovered just the exact thing to say to be in good standing with everyone. I can go to school full-time, work full-time, stay up till 3am with my friends, and smile while doing it all! Except all day all I can think about is how I’m a bad ass because I didn’t eat. Again. And every time my mom hugs me I scream like my skin is being eaten away by acid. And what the hell is that smell??? Because that smell makes me scared and I don’t know why I want to hide.
I didn’t know what trauma was. Worse than that, I couldn’t remember my trauma. The brain has this beautiful way of trying to protect us. I call it The Protection Fairy. She is blue and so full of compassion and love. She means well, but she has terrible follow-up. She shows up to all the boys and girls who have been hurt and are not capable of making sense of something far above their paygrade. She takes the memories and fears and hides them in different parts of our bodies. The GI issues, frequent UTIs, heart racing with no understanding as to why, feeling like a caged animal when someone gets too close... We don’t have the memories, but the body remembers. The body was there too. But because The Protection Fairy may not come back to reverse the amnesia (remember, terrible follow-up), we are left with triggers with invisible roots.
But it doesn’t matter. Because if I can just get it right then all is well and I will finally achieve happiness. Get into the right school, fit into the smaller jeans, find the perfect partner, discover the exact right phrase to be invited into someone’s life, hang these pictures exactly parallel to the floor, find the perfect shade of foundation to hide the silent chaos and sense of drowning from deep inside my soul …
Perfectionism is a stealthy beast from hell that keeps its hand around your throat and guides you through an impossibly convoluted maze. With each wrong step the hand wrenches you back to the approved path. The beast lies and tells you it is leading you to the promised land, when really it is seducing you into hell. The hell is not trusting your intuition. Forgetting that once upon a time you had a deep knowing as to what your truth was and how to stand in its light. The hell is operating through such a narrow lens that you are perpetually on the verge of choking. The hell is being deluded into thinking there is something fundamentally wrong in who you are and THAT is why you can’t feel the vibration of life.
The fairy protected you when no one else could. Now it’s time for you to remember your own magic and start fighting back.