I am a perfectionist.
When I was a child, I liked having things go ‘my way’. I had expectations that my sanity and ultimate happiness relied on. When things didn’t go according to plan, I freaked out. In fact, I still do this – but I’ve learned to ease up on my demands and keep my tantrums to a minimum.
I like a sense of organization. Even if it’s a sort of organized mess, I prefer having a general idea of where everything is. I’ve developed personal routines and there are many methods to my madness.
I like straight lines and even numbers. I like situations that are easy to make sense of. I have a low tolerance for even the smallest flaws. It’s the way I’ve always been; mess with it and I’ll quickly escalate into panic mode.
Putting myself into panic mode because things aren’t perfect: It’s been my lifelong obsession and personal faux pas. It’s a decision I’ve made over and over and over again, and it’s changed my life in dramatic ways.
Because for as long as I can remember, all I ever wanted was to reach and maintain some level of ‘perfection’. On paper and in person, I wanted to be everything that anyone could ever want or be proud of. I had this ideal image designed inside my head and I wanted to reach that level of excellence.
*See that part where I wanted people to be proud of me? That was my second mistake – doing it for the people, on top of trying to reach perfection for myself.*
Hit the rewind button again and go back to when I was little kid – I remember myself with what I considered a ‘mini beer belly’. To be honest, I’m probably the only person who ever considered it a significant physical detail; others probably don’t remember much obsession with the Little Mermaid, Barbie dolls, and pandas.
But as far back as I can remember, that tiny protruding belly was always something I worried about. Growing up into a young tween and then a teenage girl with raging hormones, it was a part of my body that I obsessed over. I preoccupied myself with the fact that my mid section wasn’t totally flat and seemingly flawless like some of my classmates or the celebrities in the trashy magazines I read. I was so focused on that tiny, extra roll that appeared when I bent over in my too tight clothing. I didn’t like it.
I spent so much of my time at high school reminding myself to keep my stomach sucked in so it looked a little flatter. When I got dressed, I strategically trapped myself in extra tight tube tops that highlighted my ample bust line or chose crop tops that showed that small lower strip of mid section I didn’t mind. I agonized over the way the middle of my body looked all the time, while comparing myself to every other girl at school or at the mall.
I was your typical teenage girl, being dramatic and silly.
Around the age of 20, I discovered the magical effects of working out and nourishing my body with healthy meals. With a little hard work and dedication, I finally managed to make that little pouch of skin almost disappear and replaced it with almost visible abs. Finally, I was happy to wake up every day to the flat stomach I had always wished for. A side profile of my body showed a nice straight line under the perfect curve of my breasts and I was ecstatic.
In the mirror, I saw perfection. This made me smile.
But reality eventually sunk in and I became increasingly aware that ’perfection’ is a pretty high standard to meet. Okay, it’s actually impossible – but I didn’t realize that then. I was infatuated with keeping my body in that physical state that made me happy, and even if it wasn’t easy, I was determined to keep that feeling alive.
Except life got unexpectedly stressful and keeping up with ‘perfection’ was harder than I could handle.
I was 22 and heading back to school. I didn’t fully prepare myself for the adventure ahead of me, and was caught off guard by the intense amounts of homework I was responsible for and the long hours that came with completing it. I was at school for most hours of the day with limited access to the healthy meals I’d been eating for months. I was too busy and too exhausted to work out. On top of it all, I was living in a house with an entire pantry dedicated to junk food and an excess of vending machines taunted me from every hallway at the school.
The stress got to me and I turned to food for comfort. Food had always been a symbol of good feelings in my life (this is a whole different story in itself); when I needed to feel better, it was a sensible solution for me. In my mind, jelly beans and sour cream potato chips and fries smothered in gravy always provided that same, deliciously warm feeling inside me no matter how frustrating or hard life got.
They call it comfort food for a reason.
My stress, lack of sleep, and the development of my overall laziness lead to bad choices. My bad choices lead to my weight gain. All of the sudden my body was squishy again. You could see my face getting rounder. The little buddha belly thing I had despised my whole life came back.
One day after eating almost an entire box of cookies, I took a good look in the mirror and sat with the reality that I had just inhaled an entire box of cookies in search of solace. I freaked out, and then I freaked out again. Then I panicked.
I tried to fix it. But I did it all wrong.
I vividly remember telling myself it was only going to happen the one time; that that quick fix of purging my digestive system was a one time thing. I was going to change my ways and fix my problems in a healthier way. But it happened again. And after another build up of stress, another box of cookies and another panic attack just one week later, I promised myself again that it would be the last time. Four years later, I was still stressed, still panicking, and digging myself a deeper grave with my consistent binging and purging behaviours.
My health was deteriorating at a rapid pace. I became anaemic and I was really depressed. I sabotaged romantic relationships and lost sense of my true self. I was unhappy all the time and I cried more often that not.
The cycle of my depression and my poor behaviour was vicious. I was extremely miserable with myself, so I literally stuffed my body with mass quantities of food that tasted good until there wasn’t any room left to fit anything. Oddly, I never really felt satisfied; I felt sick, ugly, and disgusting. And so, I would go and purge my system… again, and again. And again.
My life was falling apart.
I was a mess. I hated my body and what I was doing to it, but I couldn’t stop. Every day for years, it only got worse because I was too scared to tell anyone. I didn’t want them to be ashamed of me or make me feel ashamed of myself. I didn’t want to disappoint the people I loved and lose the love they’d always given me for appearing like a better version of whatever this was.
For way too long, I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know how to tell the world I wasn’t perfect. I just kept trying to fix myself in all the wrong ways, feeding my addiction and my obsessions, giving into the monsters. For so long, I was too scared to say anything.
I was too scared, too ashamed, too frustrated with everything I was. I was exhausted of being sick and tired, and sad. In my tiredness and my inability to feel anything but hopeless, I fell asleep in the hallway of my apartment, curled up on the floor. When I woke up, I looked at myself in the mirrored closet door and stared at the horrific reflection of the worst version of myself.
Looking back at me, I saw someone who was completely defeated; someone who was sad and stressed, lost. As I sat there, I thought about the bigger picture and realized that so many people in my life were sad and stressed, too. I knew they all loved me and could tell I hadn’t been myself for so long, but they didn’t know my secret which meant they didn’t know how to help me; they could only watch me fall apart.
I sat there for a long time, feeling disgusted – because I didn’t like the way I looked or felt, but also because I had made myself look and feel this way. Even though I knew that I didn’t mean to and that I hadn’t been myself, I couldn’t help but be miserable about my own actions. I felt sorry for myself. I was sorry that I had no control over my bad habits and my damaging addiction. I was sorry that I was hurting myself and my relationships with all the people who loved me and believed in me. I was sorry, because I felt like I had let them down. I was sorry because more than anything, I had let myself down.
I was sorry that I didn’t realize how bad it really was and that I let it go on this long.
I was afraid of myself. I was afraid of my future. I was also afraid of telling anyone, and the possibility of everyone leaving me because I wasn’t perfect.
This whole experience of self reflection lasted awhile, before I curled back into a ball and cried, then fell asleep on the floor again. When I woke up the next morning, dehydrated and worn out by all my emotions, I knew I was too sick and too tired to continue feeling sick and tired.
I had several choices, all of them terrifying and definitely life changing. I could go on living my life this way until I sent myself to the hospital or killed myself in the process of my torturous ways. I could take my own life before it got worse. Or, I could take a chance and tell someone about what I was going through, and see what happened.
To be honest, I just felt like the last option was the least intimidating out of the three I had given myself. What if I tried to die by suicide and failed? What if I got so sick and only caused my family more stress – them having to take care of me, monitor me, babysit me for the rest of my life? My fingers quivering, I wrote an email to my best friend and confessed to the biggest secret of my life. I waited with baited breath… and then she wrote back and she called me with nothing but her unconditional support. This gave me the courage to tell another best friend, with the same results.
Telling my mother that I was struggling with an eating disorder was the hardest and most frightening moment of my life. When I told her, she cried. Then she hugged me and we cried together. When she pulled away, she looked at me and she told me that she loved me, and she said “Jen, everything is going to be okay. You are okay.”
All of that is severely compressed; speaking out loud about my suffering was not as easy as I just made it sound. Telling people about my struggles, exposing my vulnerability, and asking for help was really hard. My life drastically changed because of it.
Putting myself and my recovery first meant quitting my job and relocating back to my hometown so I was surrounded by a solid support system. In doing so, I’ve put a suspicious red flag on my resume and caused people to question my decisions regarding a career I was working so hard for.
Personally and professionally, I’m not where I expected or want to be. It’s a new struggle I face while trying to recover from a previous one. I have days when I feel really good about myself, and days when my demons still haunt me in the worst ways. Every day is an adventure and a roller coaster of emotions, and no two days are the same.
In my process of recovery and understanding myself, I’m slowly starting to embrace the fact that there is no such thing as perfection and we, as humans, aren’t designed to be anything even close to that.
We are allowed to make mistakes and poor choices. We’re allowed to misunderstand, go the wrong way, and fuck things up every once in a while.
We don’t have to be right all the time. We don’t have to be flawless.
It’s okay to not be okay. And it’s okay to ask for help when you feel broken.
It’s absolutely unfortunate that stigma, discrimination, and general misunderstanding and poor judgement encourages an overwhelming fear of accepting the reality of mental health issues in our world.
It’s sad that people, myself included, feel the need to suffer instead of ask for just a little bit of help and often end up dismally spiralling their life out of control. It’s heartbreaking to hear about lives ending too soon because the monsters of mental illnesses torture poor souls to the point of hopeless states.
If you don’t feel like you think you should or if you feel like life’s being too hard on you, please do not be afraid to say something to even just one person. Just because you struggle with some form of mental illness, it does not make you any less worthy.
It means that like everyone in this world, your life isn’t perfect.
And that’s okay. It’s part of what makes you human.
As a little girl, I dreamed of being grown up and having this ‘perfect’ life. I’d be as beautiful as women on the fronts of magazine, with a handsome husband and adorable little family. I would have a wonderful job and we’d all live happily ever after in our lovely home, with everything we could ever need or want.
As a teenager, I fantasized about having a perfect hourglass figure. I wanted to easily fit into any fashion trend, look good in anything, and have all the boys drool over me the way they did over the women in the magazines they hid under their bed.
I had created this ideal image in my head of what I should be and I became obsessed with it. It took over my life and changed it dramatically. I didn’t do anything wrong and I’m not a bad person.
My mind just got mixed up along the way.
Even as I write this, I’m worried about how to end it. I want it to be just right and maintain the good rapport I’ve created with previous pieces I’ve written. I know it’s not perfect. It never will be and it doesn’t have to be, because more than ever before, I’m being myself.
I am not perfect.
I know that accepting your flaws isn’t easy. I also know that admitting that you’re scared, helpless, and hopeless is fucking intimidating.
I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t hard to open up. I can’t deny that the aftermath of me being honest with myself and the people who cared about me has definitely had it’s own sort of struggles. I have good days and I have bad days; I have really bad days and even worse weeks. But none of it is as excruciating as feeling as sad as I did when I tried to fight my battles on my own.
None of us deserve to be a slave to the monsters inside our heads. Being vulnerable is scary, but I promise you – it’s not as scary as what you might be going through all alone.
Don’t be afraid to break your silence. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Speak up and let’s talk about it. Let’s make mental health matter more.
We deserve it.
