Teen Girl Perfectionism: My Story and Thoughts

Hello beautiful! I hope you are doing well! I've spent my first full week for summer shelving library books and looking after pre-schoolers, and it's been amazing. Today, I writing about perfectionism. As someone who knows what it feels like to be weighed down by my own expectations of myself, I'm going to bring my opinions on perfectionism to the conversation and also speak about how perfectionism affects women and girls. If you have something you'd like to add or a contradiction to something that I mention, put your ideas in the comments. I would love to hear more opinions on the matter!

I want to start with my personal experiences with perfectionism. Mostly during middle school, I felt like everything that I did had to meet everyone's expectations. Whether it was my grades, clothes, appearance, or behavior, everything that I did had to be perfect or I wouldn't be happy with it. My overall perfectionist qualities stemmed from academic perfectionism, and that mindset spread to and infected almost all other areas of my life.

Now that I'm a little bit older, I can definitely see many reasons why I felt that pressure to do well in school. First, the most obvious point of expectations was my parents. They DO NOT PLAY about education, which I understand. In elementary school, they checked on my performance in school quite often, but in middle and high school, they just started trusting that I would study and get A's on my own. I enjoy the independence, but even though my parents aren't looking at my grades as often, the pressure and the expectations are 100% still there.

For me and my family, there is another element of our lives that makes me feel like I have to be near perfect academically. My parents are both immigrants, and they've both risked so much and worked so hard so that my brother and I could have a private school education. I feel like I owe it to them to make the most of the opportunities they've given me and that anything less than perfect scores is a waste of their hard work.

The final contributor to my perfectionism that I want to mention is the need to prove myself, on two different fronts. Especially recently, I've felt like I have to appear polished and intelligent to combat any assumptions made about because I'm a Black girl. I've been very lucky to go to a school in a relatively diverse area, and I know that I don't have to prove myself to anyone, but I still feel that I always have to be the most picture-perfect version of myself, so that people won't think poorly of me because of my race, gender, or both.

Atelophobia -Source: Elise Bell/ @artbyelisebee

I want to spend the rest of this post unpacking the "gender" aspect of perfectionism, because while doing research for this post, I found that young girls and women are perfectionists more that boys and men. I can't say that I was surprised, but I started thinking about why that is. From the very beginning, girls are raised to be polite and compliant and to not be difficult or cause problems. These qualities can develop into what we know as perfectionism in teenage girls and adult women.

Women also have to manage demeaning assumptions made about their abilities, intelligence, and strength that men usually don't receive. As I mentioned earlier, I often feel like have to work harder just to prove that I'm capable and work against the stereotypes that paint women as dumb and unfit for roles of power. It's likely that many other women experience something similar and push themselves to be perfect and prove their worth to others.

Finally, women are often expected to take on roles in the house and at work and never utter a word of complaint while balancing it all. As women have gotten more freedom to pursue roles in the workplace and in historically male-dominated fields, we're still doing the housework and childcare at the same time. So now, women can feel pressure coming in from multiple different sources: their home lives and their lives at work. Perfectionism can manifest when that pressure to excel in all areas becomes more and more extreme.

But, here's the thing that really gets me about perfectionism in women and girls (and perfectionism in general). It holds people back from actually becoming that "perfect self" that we want to achieve. For example, if a teenage girl wants to get better at dancing, but she's scared of failure, she might not audition to join an advanced dance team, because she thinks she might not make it. But if she had tried out, she would have either made it onto the team or learned from what went wrong in the audition and improved. Either way, putting herself out there would have gotten her closer to her goal: get better. But, staying in her comfort zone, where she isn't getting closer to her goal, is only making her feel worse about herself and her abilities.

The point I'm trying to make here is that perfectionism is a cycle. Get scared of failure, miss out on an opportunity, fall behind and fail in the moment because of that missed opportunity, and then get scared of failure and try to prevent it from happening again. Especially as young women who have been held back in history, we can't afford to lose more time nit-picking the little things. That's not meant to scare you but just to serve as a reminder that perfectionism isn't always the best way to do big things; sometimes, it's just what's holding you back.

That's all for now! Let me know if you have any suggestions for posts. I want to know what kind of writing you all would like!

Remember, if you ever ned a hand, girl, let me help!