For many years, I had a very precise vision of the person I wanted to be when I graduated high school. This vision has not come to fruition in almost any of the ways I expected, and for the first few months of senior year, I lay awake thinking about how I had failed my younger self.

To freshman year me, success was equivalent to perfection. It meant perfect grades, the perfect amount of sleep, the perfect balance between social life, family life, and studying. 

But I couldn’t have it all — knowing this, I told people that my main philosophy was the common adage, “Shoot for the stars and you’ll land amongst the stars.” If I could shoot for perfection, then maybe I wouldn’t achieve it, but I would get somewhere close, and thus, my perfectionism was more optimistic overachieving than unhealthy motivation. 

At first, it was easy to balance everything. But as I quickly learned, high school kind of sneaks up on you. After all, I had kept pushing myself far past my limits, and it began to manifest in tiny ways. 

Activities deemed self care went first. I stopped reading. I stopped drawing. I joke that I need to touch grass, but there would genuinely be weeks where I wouldn’t be outside for more than ten minutes.

Then my grades started to slip. Suddenly, it felt like the most monumental task to simply pull out a book to study. Any assignment that was optional became invisible to me, where I used to go out of my way to ask for additional challenges.

Thus arrived the question that kept me up at night: for someone who had shot so hard for the moon once upon a time, how had I ended up nowhere near the stars? After giving all that sanity up?

It’s important to establish first, I am the most biased narrator of all time. By many metrics, I’ve been doing great — I am loved, I am healthy, and I learned a lot over the past four years. Perfectionism is a pro at making me forget those things, even though they’re the most important things to remember. (The Haven bubble is real.)

I had thought aiming high meant getting a checklist done. I’ve picked apart the last four years over again and again, as if rewinding the tape of a game to figure out the enemy’s weakness, as if I could locate the exact moment I could turn to the camera in playback and say, “That was the moment everything went wrong and here’s what I would do differently.”

This too, is a form of perfectionism. 

“I think your younger self would have been proud of you,” my mom said, after I told her how I felt. “I just think your metrics are more about the person you wanted to become than the things you had to accomplish.”

As the year closes out, and it becomes vividly clear how silly those arbitrary metrics are in the face of The World (a huge and truly unfathomable entity), I’ve discovered the best way to unlearn perfectionism is to end the playback. It’s over and it’s done. 

After all that perfectionism, I know that I will continue aiming high. But this time, instead of being a checklist of achievements, it will be the person I wish my freshman self could have met: someone who is kind to everyone, but kindest to themselves.

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