Birthplace of my Perfectionism

My mother and I

I remember being in a parent teacher conference with my mother in elementary school. 

The teacher was mentioning how well I was doing, referring to the tally of “A’s” in each column. My mother scanned downward along the list, her eyes catching on the single “B” listed amongst the rest, in the section labeled Participation. 

My mom’s disappointment seared into my memory, alongside the image of my teacher beaming at me. My face grew red with shame around the blemish on my report. She started to get loud, as she does.. Her voice animated around the B and I spent the rest of the time trying to calm her down in our native tongue, translating between them two, as my teacher tried to redirect my mother to focus on the big picture. Utter confusion could only describe my teacher’s face. I knew even she couldn’t protect me from my mother’s wrath.

Sometimes, in the dark recesses of my mind, I wish I had a white mother.

I was in second grade.

That day, I learned that less than perfect wasn’t good enough. I shook hands with perfectionism and we made a silent pact to never let that happen again.

From that day on, I never got anything less than an A in any class or subject. I thought to myself - if this was the only thing that mattered to her, then I would meet her expectation in spades. So nothing could be said about my performance. My perfectionism was subtle in its ways, it became background to my life and something I accepted as an intrinsic part of my identity, when it really wasn’t. 

This sole criteria and indicator of academic achievement narrowed my sense of what else mattered about a person. It was reductive. 

I was reduced.

Perfectionism shows up in sneaky ways, creeps in between the golf ball of shame lodged in your throat when a family member comments about your weight, in the disgust placed around the color of your skin when you’re tan after a summer in the sun, when you receive questions about that “-“ minus next to that capital A. It’s reinforced when you’re taken out of an activity you love because you’re “bad at it.” It doesn’t matter if you’re only 7 years old. It’s no wonder you begin to question whether you’re good enough. And perfectionism becomes the salve for all your ailments. A solution born from trauma.

It masks what else is possible, what else may be important, if there is an end to the hamster wheel of achievement. It limits who we can be and reinforces the model minority myth.

Sometimes you can ignore it, and sometimes despite your best efforts, it seeps in, like pollution from living close to a highway. Insidious.

Until someone else’s expectations morph into your own and it becomes hard to tease apart what is you and what is not.

And sometimes it becomes bait for low confidence, not starting things out of fear of failure, or rejecting achievement all together. 

I think the first step to emerging from the fog of others is to ask yourself, why you’re doing what you’re doing, to really understand your motivations, and to get clear cut on your values. 

It was only when I began to question what was driving me and what made me proud of myself, that I began making choices for me. Striving for myself feels a lot different than doing it for someone else or doing something out of a place of fear or shame around not doing the thing.

Now let me clarify- It is not that aspiring for high achievement is not a bad thing. But when it is the only thing you learn to put focus to or when our standards become unrelenting and unrealistic, we are the only ones who suffer under that weight. And we suffer whenever we’re not achieving. We suffer whenever we’re not “doing,” producing, etc.

Like many others, I imagine, I thought this was just a cultural norm/ burden I was meant to shoulder, all while my own rage stirred beneath.

Like so many other people, and children of immigrants (this experience being so common it is an Asian stereotype), there is a normalization of this cultural trauma, it borders on collective. 

Collective traumatic experiences get invalidated when we brush it off as normal, when we make jokes about it.

Perhaps we laugh at the joke so we don’t cry when this phenomenon is mentioned

Just because something is a cultural norm, doesn’t make it healthy

Just because something is a common experience doesn’t make it less damaging to live through it.

While I now cringe slightly at how narrow my view of life was as a child, I don’t blame my mother for doing what she thought was best and inadvertently passing on her intergenerational wounding. I recognize she didn’t have the tools and resources to break the cycle. I’m not angry that my focus fell on academics, for I loved school for so many other reasons. I just wish I knew I was worthy despite what letter was on that piece of paper.

As we get older, become adults, or even parents ourselves, we get a chance to do it differently. And that starts with changing our relationship with ourselves and with perfection. We can decide whether cultural norms work for us or if they’ve done more damage than good.

My healing journey has upended many of the things I once thought defined me.

May we give ourselves permission to change, to rewrite our story, to heal generational wounds instead of continuing their legacy.