Perfectionism isn´t something one is born with. It is taught, by people who think that shame is an adequate instrument of education. By people for whom everything is their way or the highway.
What that looks like in practice?
You have, for example, a little girl who is not as skinny as her parents would wish she was. So, she gets sneered at every time she eats anything. She´s made to sit at the dinner table directly opposite the sneerer. When she does, by that, not get slim there are special foods bought for her, things that usually were, at that time, used in the therapy of morbidly obese grown-ups. So, while the other members of the family breakfast on rolls and jam and eggs, she gets served a plateful of something that looks and tastes like wet paper and has absolutely no nutritional value. And she may not even ogle what the others eat.
When she is, because of having a "funny" way of speaking due to growing up in a different state, bullied at school the same person who sneers at her over the dinner table tells her not to whine because she deserves being bullied, after all, she is fat.
And once a week, she is weighed on a big scale, and her weight written on a list that´s pinned on the wall for everyone in the household to see.
If the list shows a gain, she´s sneered at again.Even if having lost, she is told she´s still too fat because she´s heavier than **** who just happens to be half a head shorter.
That little girl was me.
One of those infamous weighing lists has survived, and I found it recently between the pages of a book.
Now, today, I have access to information I did not have as a child. Namely, the medical weight charts for children by height and weight. And the weights recorded on that list by date were all within the normal weight range. I was not even overweight then, much less obese.
But the way I was treated back then convinced me that I had to be incredibly fat and ugly, even if I didn´t see it myself. I don´t know if the weight gains that followed were due to my body trying to adapt to what my mind thought it looked like. What I know is that on the day I first looked at a picture of myself at top weight my first thought was, now I really look like what I felt I looked like all my life. And the second thought was a rush of anger at the person who made me believe I looked like that long before the fact. And who thereby set me up for a long descent into yo-yo-dieting hell, because trying to get my body down from the healthy weight it had as a child to the weight that this person told me I should have ended up messing up my metabolism so badly that there was a time in my life when I was eating a strict diet of under 800 calories a day (I couldn´t cheat on that because they were prepackaged portions) and I was gaining weight.
To this day, eating what people who were never overweight can eat would send my weight up like a rocket.
The most incredible part of that sad story is that the offender from back then to this day does not realize there was anything wrong with the way I was treated, that this person still believes that what this person did was the best way to treat a child.
To them, love was something that had to be earned, and the only way to earn it was by being perfect.
And what perfection meant was defined by them.
So, what was I to do as a child, who desperately wanted their love and approval? I started making myself into the picture of what I thought was expected of me, and hide all the things about me I thought they wouldn´t approve of. I ate almost nothing at the dinner table, only to stuff my face with sausages and cheese when taking the leftovers to the kitchen. I became an expert in swallowing things whole because I must not be chewing any more when coming back to get the next dish. And for me, the one morning a week when I would go to the cafeteria in secret and order a real breakfast with honey, bread and an egg, meant eating heaven.
I sometimes think that it was my sense of self-preservation that was keeping me away from becoming anorexic. What it didn´t prevent was that the ideas of what a "good" body would look like took deep root inside me, and made me, whatever else my achievements were, feel deeply inadequate.
When I was unhappy I told myself I was not trying hard enough to be what was expected.
And then I got lucky, even if it didn´t feel like that at the time.
I was, at that time, already morbidly obese because I had been stuffing down my hurt feelings with giant amounts of cookies,vanilla ice cream and chocolate pudding for quite a while, and I did not feel too good about my body.
That was when I first met my now husband.
And I discovered, for the first time in my life, what it means to have a soulmate, a person who accepts you just as you are, who shares the same interests and who never ever withholds his love from you until after you have changed yourself.
A person whose love is a gift, one that is freely given and does not have to be earned by conforming to their particular kind of perfectionism.
Someone whose love I don´t have to pay for by selling my soul, by denying who I am.
It is only slowly that I am learning to see myself with a loving eye, that I learn not to critize myself for the things about myself that I did not manage to change.
And slowly, I realize that these very things are what is the essence of me, that these things are what makes me, me.
As I wrote yesterday, it is difficult to let go of perfectionism. But I think it is incredibly worthwhile.
And by accepting what I am, maybe I can finally become the best me- not perfect, just good enough. But, for the first time in my life, okay with what I am. Curves and all.
Because then, trying to make my body healthier is no longer driven by feelings of inadequacy, and I may, at last, find out what this body is meant to be if I treat it right.
Without measuring myself against someone else´s unrealistic standards.
Julia
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