On: Perfection

Growing up, the standard for my life was absolute perfection. My mother simply wouldn’t tolerate anything else. As a result, I made straight A’s, was always the best violinist (then, pianist, then bassist, etc), even when competing with “peers” 10+ years older than me. I had to be all the “godly” qualities expected of conservative Lutheran girls. I had to be perfectly obedient, perfectly quiet, perfectly helpful, perfectly coiffed (I wasn’t allowed to wear pants to school until 4th grade. Stockings, slip, and dress were required.

How did Holly do it, you ask? How did she manage to squash the normal human child instincts from my soul? It’s quite simple: she did not allow mistakes. She even had a mantra to go along with her philosophy of perfection: “There’s no such thing as mistakes.” The implication was that, if you did something wrong, you were merely not trying hard enough. As a result, she would get angry about my tiniest missteps - all of them. Sometimes it was Small Mad, sometimes it was Big Mad, and sometimes it was TERRIFYING Mad!!

Let me offer an example by way of a story. One time, there was a mother/daughter tea at my elementary school that I desperately wanted to go to. I believe she had agreed to go, but maybe forgot or something? Anyway, I must have done something between the time I got home from school and the afternoon tea party (I don’t remember because whatever it was, it wasn’t a big enough deal for even a Little Mad). Whatever I did, it made Holly mad.

Holly’s anger response was hair triggered and nuclear. Her go-to punishment was The Silent Treatment, which was standard protocol for Small Mad. If something set her off and pushed her to Big Mad, the protocol would escalate to the Silent/Banging stage. The SilentBanging stage is when my mom would get Big Mad, then go silent, refusing to talk to anyone, while simultaneously crashbanging around the house SUPER loudly. To this day, the sound of slamming kitchen cabinets triggers me.

I must have initiated Stage 3 by timidly asking, “so, are we going to go?” Well, that was apparently a mistake. Holly screamed at me (and her screaming was SO loud and scary) to “GET IN THE CAR!!!”. Stage 3 combined with driving produced an effect my brothers and I called Cruella DeVille. You don’t need an imagination... When Holly rage-drove, she was horrifying. She drove the 1.5 miles of small neighborhood streets at 75mph, running every stop sign, and not looking at the road. I knew better than to complain or ask her to be careful – that would only make things worse. I just sat in the passenger seat, dissociated and holding back tears. Once inside the school (miraculously still alive) Holly was the life of the party, the belle of the ball, so charming and lovely - what a good mother! And, of course, on the drive home she acted like nothing ever happened, and we certainly never discussed it ever again.

That’s how I grew up. Every single day. We never knew from day to day how “bad” Mom was going to be, although it was my designated job in the sibling group to read her moods, being the only one expected to have any emotional intelligence. There was one predictable thing we could always count on, though: Making mistakes was DEADLY. That is something that my nervous system still believes to this day. It doesn’t matter how much therapy I have, how much self-care I perform, how much sleep I get. In the world I was born and raised on, making a mistake might literally kill you. The only remedy is perfection. Perfection = Alive.

And now, 30 years later, Holly lives on in my relationships with authority. There are several times I have had an extremely micromanaging boss, where everything I say gets nitpicked and argued with. I won’t bore you with the litany of BS I’ve endured, but it takes me to the point where I feel like I can’t even breathe around a boss like that. They make me feel like my insides are clawing their way out of my body. The moment I see them walking my way or hear their voice, I dissociate. There’s not a thing I can do to “fix” myself once I reach that state. The core of who I Am tells me that making mistakes is deadly, asking for what you want produces violence, and speaking up results in withdrawal of attention and affection.

It’s been a long, arduous process to heal from this level of trauma. Untangling this information and understanding myself and my triggers is allowing me to finally begin advocating for myself. I now know that it’s okay to quit a “good job” because your boss is abusive and awakens your demons. It's okay to remove or demote people in your life who make you feel unsafe. Moving forward, I won’t shy away from asking hard questions of the people in my life because my needs are just as important as any others' needs, and I don’t need to offer my soul to an unruly abusive human.