Popping Bubbles and Pursuing Wholeness

On Recovering from Perfectionism

Dear reader,

One of my favorite lessons to teach to my students has been the hardest lesson for me to learn: the importance of pursuing wholeness over perfection. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? And yet, it presents a challenge to most everyone. We situate the lesson very intentionally, in the final month of our six-month program and four-module course, because as critical as it is for peace and fulfillment, striving toward wholeness is like a toddler grasping for a bubble floating through the breeze.

It feels fun, enjoyable from the outset, but as her fingers draw near the delicate outline, it bursts. Disappears. Drops to the ground in one irredeemable water droplet. And then, it’s gone.

Pursuing wholeness can feel ethereal. Vapory. Intangible. And until one has walked through the dark woods of their own self-discovery and accumulated substantial self-knowledge, it is. This is why, for many of us, pursuing perfection is easier to grasp. Although the goal post is perpetually moving further and further away, perfection provides us with a vague sense of what needs to be accomplished.

Erase the needs.

Deflate the desires.

Appease the parents.

Put on the mask.

Get the grades.

Shrink the body.

Earn the degree.

Hold down the job.

Put up the picket fence.

Have 1.5 children.

Be good.

Do good.

Don’t complain.

Perfection, however unattainable, is a straight-shooter. It’s modeled, if not mandated, in our family systems and cultural framework. As a woman, striving for perfection has often felt inextricable from my sense of worth and general social standing. Everywhere I look, for as long as I can remember, something or someone has told me that there was a better way to “be.”

And so, I constructed her: a more ideal, palatable version who believed, to her own detriment and heartbreak, “I am only good and lovable if I am perfect, and any gaps in perfection are pieces of myself that must be hidden.”

Beneath my perfectionism was the belief that who I was and what I deserved was dependent upon my appearance and behaviors. My identity was linked to how I looked and what I could accomplish, and most notably what I could accomplish without flaw. An error wasn’t simply a mistake, but a blemish on my personhood. And god forbid there was ever a real blemish on my skin; the self-hatred would consume me for weeks.

The aspects of myself that felt less than ideal were shut away under lock and key, hidden from others’ view long enough that they disappeared from mine, too. This — this fragmentation for a figment of our imagination, perfection — sits opposite to wholeness.

Perfection is everything that wholeness is not, and vice versa. These positions exist on two extreme ends of one spectrum. Pursuing one moves us directly and unavoidably away from the other. So, as I fervently I broke myself into little perfect pieces to please the world around me, I removed any possibility of integration.

Of being one real, whole human.

For decades, I believed that my literal existence was anchored to my ability to be perfect. I believed and believed…until my bubble of perfection was popped.