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April 20 - April 30, 2025
If you’re lucky, you won’t be able to settle for someone else’s version of success, nice and likable as it may be. Something will tap tap tap on the glass of your life, trying to get your attention.
Something will press upon you from the inside out, eagerly demanding more from you. A better life, a bigger life. A life that fits.
This is the way so many ambitious women spend their twenties, thirties, and beyond—building the “balanced life” they were told everyone wants, then not wanting it themselves.
Some seasons of life are for work. Some seasons are for sex. Some seasons are for three of the things. Some seasons are for nine of the things. Some seasons are for meandering through depressing emptiness doing negative two of the things.
What’s the right formula for balance during a global pandemic? How about after the pandemic is “over,” but you’re still processing all the ways it’s changed you and everyone around you?
We’ve hacksawed the definition of balance to mean being good at being busy, which has nothing to do with health.
All that kindness, affection, and curiosity that so readily bursts out of little boys’ hearts is exactly what men are taught to smother if they want to be taken seriously in the world.
The most fulfilled women I know are terrible at being balanced, and I mean, truly, iconically awful at it.
Women feel an increasing sense of liberation as they age, not because they’ve finally achieved the balance they were searching for but because they’ve finally given up on it.
What’s culturally incentivized is not being healthy for yourself, it’s seeming healthy for others.
If you had to put money on it, who would you say used the hashtag #sorrynotsorry more, men or women?
The implicit message behind the word “perfectionist” is: you’re doing too much. Balance is offered (proselytized) as the corollary cure.
Women scatter their energy on a wild goose chase to find balance while internalizing their perfectly healthy desire for more as a deficiency in gratitude.
You can be angry and full of love. You can be grateful and want more. You do not need to balance any of this out.
A woman who wants more is ungrateful, a man who wants more is a visionary. A woman who seeks power is “power hungry,” a man who seeks power is an “alpha male.” These narratives are boring and raggedy. Be done.
The underbelly of ambition is a pain perfectionists know well—you realize you’re overextended, but you can’t see any alternatives other than to keep pushing.
Perfectionists reliably choose to operate over their equilibriums. For perfectionists, the risk of being underwhelmed is much scarier than the risk of being overwhelmed.
We notice the space between the ideal we envision and the reality plunked down in our laps. The noticing creates a tightening, which then seeks an outlet for release.
Perfectionists live with a tension inside them that never goes away. Like a light that makes a sound when it’s on, you get used to the hum.
Reconciling the backseat fighting between your limits and your potential is the underlying challenge of perfectionism.
While compulsivity is often used as a clinical marker for dysfunction, it’s not automatically dysfunctional.
Accepting that perfectionism is compulsive means accepting that, as a perfectionist, you will always be compelled to actively strive towards the ideal your perfectionist type represents.
You don’t achieve liberation through control; you achieve liberation through acceptance.
Average is not a bad thing. Perfectionists are totally fine operating at an average and below-average level in a lot of areas, just not the areas they long to excel in.
You can’t be a healthy perfectionist unless you learn how to cultivate and recognize an appreciation for enough. But you can appreciate enough and still want more. That’s healthy, too.
The trick is not to figure out how to stop wanting to excel so much—for true perfectionists, that always backfires. The trick is to figure out how to excel based on your values, not someone else’s values.
All perfectionists have vocal inner critics. Adaptive perfectionists learn how to respond to their inner critics with compassion, thereby disabling negative self-talk from having power over them—but the tape still plays.
Your work is to examine the degree to which your thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and interpersonal relationships are disrupting or enhancing your quality of life.
When your bottomless striving is value driven and executed in a healthy way, it’s a singular joy. The reward of doing work you know you can never finish is that you get to continue to do the work.
Is your motivation to bridge the gulf between an ideal and reality born from the desire to excel and grow (adaptive) or from the need to compensate for perceived inadequacies and avoid failure (maladaptive)?
Are you hurting yourself or others in the process (maladaptive)? Or are you striving in a way that feels good for you (adaptive)?
Your self-worth is prearranged; you have no hand in it. From the day you were born until the day you die, you remain worthy.
Self-worth is about what you feel and believe you deserve. The distinction is a source of confusion for those perfectionists who may have high self-esteem but who also find themselves feeling insecure.
When you know you’re already whole and complete (i.e., perfect) as you are, you’re operating from a mindset of abundance. You already have what you need, and you feel secure. For adaptive perfectionists, striving towards an ideal is a celebratory expression of that security.
If you’re in a maladaptive mindset, it’s not necessarily that you feel worthless. You just don’t feel fully worthy right now.
When you’re disconnected from your self-worth, you think your ability to feel joy is won through goal attainment.
You don’t earn your way to joy. Joy is a birthright. So is love, freedom, dignity, and connection. As the inimitable James Baldwin said, “Your crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is wear it.”
The more you’ve established a connection to your self-worth, the more easily you can realign yourself when you lose your footing, but we all lose our footing.
When I use the terms “adaptive” and “maladaptive” to describe perfectionists, I’m referring to the mindset the person is in, not the person themselves.
Adaptively expressed, object perfectionism helps enhance a feeling of wholeness and perfection that already exists within you. Maladaptively expressed, object perfectionism reflects your dependency on an external object to make you feel whole and perfect on the inside.
You start trying to compensate for something you don’t need to compensate for. You start trying to earn something that already belongs to you.
For procrastinator perfectionists, it looks like waiting too long and then never doing it. For messy perfectionists, it looks like sabotaging yourself by saying yes to everything while committing to nothing.
For everyone, maladaptive perfectionism looks like taking a moment of disconnection and responding to it in a way that renders you isolated. Instead of harnessing your authentic power, you double down on superficial control.
Power, by contrast, is unlimited and can be shared. If you’re a person in a position of power and you empower someone else (you give someone else power), you haven’t lost any power.
The confidence of having already won liberates your potential. When your self-worth isn’t on the line, it becomes easier to take risks. You get more of what you want because you’re more willing to risk trying.
If you want to be a leader in your field, in your family, in your community, in the world, you need to learn how to be powerful, not controlling.
Control encourages restriction; power encourages freedom. Control is petty; power is generous. Control micromanages; power inspires. Control manipulates; power influences.
Even when something is functionally perfect, if the person isn’t present, they’re destined to find fault with it.
You can be present and feel tired. You can be present and feel heartbroken. You can be present and not feel ready. Presence guarantees freedom, not happiness.
Being present invites relief from living in a world where what’s missing and wrong relentlessly eclipses what’s good and already there.
