When I was little, my mom dealt with a lot as a single mom. We weren’t the easiest kids, and my dad’s suicide left her alone to deal with a 9 year old, 5 year old and 1 year old completely solo.
I didn’t learn til a few months ago that she almost uprooted our entire family to move back to the Philippines with her family for more support. It was my sister that shouldered more of the load so that we could stay in the states.
Things were difficult and she’s Filipino. When you’re overwhelmed, but also trying to the best you possibly can, inevitably you struggle.
Pent up energy is difficult to deal with – now being a mom I understand that. But when I was little, my mom became overwhelmed very easily – which made things difficult when everything had to be perfect.
I joke around a lot about my Asian mom and upbringing. About how every single thing in my life always had to be perfect. Straight A’s, but not just A’s – A+’s Always on time. Never a moment late. Do everything perfectly. What’s the point otherwise?
There was a constant anxiety that was born from that. And even when things were perfect – it wasn’t good enough, because that was just the way things were supposed to be.
That’s one extreme. What’s the other? Failure. Ohhhh, failure. Failure wasn’t an option. You couldn’t just quit something. You couldn’t do something halfway. If you committed, you did it the best you possibly could.
Maybe looking back that’s why I lasted only 6 months playing the piano. I am an incredibly intelligent person, naturally. I pick things up quickly and generally excel at them – but when I didn’t, it scared me. I needed to be perfect. I didn’t want to practice when I wasn’t good at something, because I had to be good immediately, I didn’t have time to be bad and then become good. I had to be good RIGHT AWAY.
I’m not sure my mom ever realized (or even now realizes) the mental toll that has on a person, but it didn’t end there.
Sometimes, someone fucked up. And when one of us fucked up, NO ONE was willing to admit it. So she’d pick someone. Someone was getting hit or screamed at until they took the blame for whatever happened and admitted that they failed. Maybe in that situation the person who was to blame stepped up. Maybe they didn’t and you’d find yourself admitting that it was you when it wasn’t, just to end your pain.
I’ve written on this topic before, but maybe I didn’t realize the true impact of all of that until now. That sometimes I accept blame or find myself apologizing for things that aren’t my fault, just to end the pain.
I seek harmony and perfection in everything, to a massive fault. I seek to control my environment and I’m constantly offering up feedback to improve things. I don’t desire to be in control, but I’m willing to take control to ensure that things are done the right way.
When things go wrong, I take it very, very personally. When people are upset with me, I can’t handle it. I implode. I absolutely must know why. I have to fix it. I have to get better. Because I cannot fail. I’m fucking Asian. Hello.
I hold tightly to things. I hold tightly to perfection.And I never realized this until now – but I hold tightly to the people in my life. I seek their approval, I seek their feedback, I seek their opinions, because I need everything to be perfect for EVERYONE. I have to protect myself. I have to know everything that is going to happen so I can mitigate any possible failure or negative situation.
When I’m put in a situation where I have no control over something, or worse, someone misunderstands my need to control things as selfish, I implode. I have a total meltdown and I demand to know what I can do. There’s a desperation in it and I fall into a cycle of desperately needing to regain my loved ones approval and almost BEGGING them to tell me how I can make it right.
I can get better. It’s what I do.
Tell me how I can make it right.
Tell me how I can improve.
Tell me how I can restore harmony.
Then, when I cannot inevitably make something perfect, there’s the shame and the guilt. And it hits like a brick. And sitting in this space of guilt and shame SUCKS.
But I cannot control everything. I can’t take the pieces of a situation and recreate them into something positive. And sometimes you have to sit with that. And someday I’ll be able to deal with the fact that I cannot please everyone and rather than lament and sit there with guilt and shame, I just have to accept that sometimes I’ll disappoint people. All I can do is operate in integrity with the information that I have in an attempt to make things right.
I’ll likely never stop trying to constantly make the world around me more harmonious. It’s part of who I am. But picking apart these situations in my head helps me grow and find awareness when things seem overwhelming, or I’ve failed on something that I was really important to me.
Failure isn’t a bad thing. I don’t have to feel guilt on my failures. I just have to use them as learning opportunities and continually work to get even better.
Shame and guilt are low vibration energies, and they have no place in this elevated version of you. Feel it, let it pass, and elevate beyond it.
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