“Who are you?” is something my friends have asked me more times than I would like to admit, and if I’m being honest, it definitely triggered me the first few times. I either responded defensively or sulked into my insecurities. Sometimes both.
“What do you want?”
Seems like a simple question, but I couldn’t ever answer quickly enough. I needed time to analyze everything in my outside world to come up with an answer. I needed to compare and be validated before I would ever consider responding.
So the truth? I didn’t know the answer to either of those questions because I was constantly viewing myself from the outside in. I was a perfectionist, but not the good kind that you would mention in a job interview. No, my perfectionism was paralyzing, self-destructing, and absolutely pointless.
My friends would constantly tell me perfect isn’t real. They tried relentlessly to help me regain the clarity I had somehow lost in the black hole of comparison (they mentioned it a lot—they definitely deserve Friends of the Year Awards). They would remind me to take things slow and that I didn’t have to take on so much, but in the mind of a perfectionist, I didn’t take it as a warning sign. I heard it as someone who was doubting me and someone I had to prove wrong. In fact, that’s how I heard every piece of critical and supportive advice.