You can't sing, dance, run, skip, jump fast, write in script that is actually legible, diagram a sentence, learn most mathematical concepts or any foreign language, draw a picture of something that resembles a concrete object, and the list goes on.
Many people can't do one, two or even three or four of these things, but not to be able to do any?
When you're a young teenager and your parents are advised that these problems might be in your head, though you had testing that suggested you might have a minor case of cerebral palsy, so they send you to a camp that specializes in sports, life is hell.
Later your parents will say they have no idea what possessed them to listen to advice they knew in their hearts was wrong.
The other girls at sports camp spent much of their time making fun of you and you came back to Long Island a 13-year-old who almost refused to speak for the next two years. It wasn't as if life on Long Island was filled with friends, and things that gave you pleasure. You didn't even do well in whatever history classes you were taking, and you excelled at history.
English? It didn't matter that you could comprehend the material, and that one paper you did was beyond brilliant. For an assignment, you had your father cut construction paper in the shape of a mushroom cloud, and had him type out the words, on onionskin paper, to TS Eliot's This Is The Way The World Ends. You couldn't cut the paper so that it looked good and your lack of finger strength stopped you from actually typing anything yourself.
Your art teacher loved it. Unfortunately it wasn't for art, but rather an English project where you were supposed to draw the essence of a poem. Your teacher didn't see the irony your 13-year-old brain thought was both hilarious and profound. Your parents got it, though.
Inside you were a normal teen. Maybe a lot more political than most 13-year-old girls but your father lived for political discourse and you had to talk to somebody. Maybe you read books that were more advanced than your peers were supposed to but your mother was in charge of picking out the books for her book club. She had you pick the books because she liked your taste and could discuss the book with you before each meeting.
There's a TV show you've been watching lately, The Middle. Though you think it's named for the middle of the country and its ideals, the three kids are the quirkiest most original kids you've seen on TV in a long time. Sue, the daughter and middle child, was oblivious to the fact that she does almost everything wrong, and has few friends. You thought she was either the best adjusted kid in a weird way you've ever seen or headed for a melt-down. In this past episode she went to an "R" rated movie despite her parents objections.
When her father found out he took away her iPod, cell and a lot else. She kept begging him to take more. She deserved to be punished for life and wasn't going to settle for less. Her father ran out of things to take. Her father was perplexed. How do you punish a child who begs for punishment?
Yes," you thought, "they finally caught me on TV." But Sue of course doesn't have a pervasive developmental disorder, and she might take hours to run a mini-marathon but she can run. The point is that back when you were a teenager nobody ever said "it's OK not to do everything well. Focus on walking fast and you might even 'beat' the slow runners." Because, damn it, life was a competition and you failed. And your parents told you later they had no idea how to punish a kid who did such a great job of punishing herself.
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When you can't do so many things correctly--or, at all--how do you know what you can do right? You're going to make some stupid mistake during some part of the process. And no matter how minor the mistake your brain hasn't adjusted completely from those days when you couldn't do anything correctly.
When you were a supervisor in the computerized litigation industry your nickname was "Princess Perfect," because you could accept imperfection from people who worked for you but you couldn't accept imperfection in yourself. Everyday when the person who handed back work that had to be redone by the group because of mistakes your heart would sink into your stomach. Every day the guy would say: "Nothing for you Pia," but still you always anticipated.....
And it wasn't even a major mistake to have work handed back. It was expected. But not from you. You checked and double-checked everybody's work; assigned people the job of just checking work when they were supposed to be doing the actual work. That actually became a company-wide policy because it was efficient and you were all about efficiency in your quest not to make a mistake.You have left almost every job you have ever had not because you were doing badly but because you expected all your mistakes to come tumbling back to haunt you one day, the one day when your guard was down.
You're getting older now. Expecting mistakes to come back and haunt you in every area of life could affect your physical health. And you like living just a bit too much to allow that to happen. You don't know how much money your parents and, then, you paid for therapy. Way into the six figures.
And not one therapist ever discussed that problem because honestly you didn't realize it was a problem. You thought you were supposed to live in fear of making mistakes. Oh how your therapist laughed when you got your one and only "B" in grad school. To you that was failing. Actually the school made the teacher give you a " B+" as you were an all "A" student. You didn't even ask. Still it was hard to accept that people were pulling for you.
Didn't any therapist see your insistence on perfection as a major problem? Or were you so imperfect that they thought it a good thing you fixated on trying to be perfect?
See Courting Destiny
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© 2011 pia Savage
