can you see right through me?
postcard 37: on crippling perfectionism, rationalizing feelings to diminish them, and the elusive search for permanent happiness
I don’t know how to do things halfway. Twenty four years in, I’ve realized that maybe that’s my greatest strength and maybe it’s what makes me think that I am a difficult person to love. It’s a perfectionist thing, maybe, like I have to do everything the exact way it goes in my head. I’m selective—maybe way too picky—with the people I choose to trust and love. It takes me a long time to do so, but once it happens, I do it wholeheartedly. I’m all in or all out. I keep a small crowd of best friends around me. I trust them wholly, I love them wholly.
I think I’ve spent my entire life trying to make myself less for people, a watered down version of me, trying to extinguish how intensely I feel everything. I’ve tried being the cool girl and the chill girl and the girl who lets everything slide because I do genuinely admire when people have that ability. I wish I could be relaxed about anything. I stretch myself as thin as I can across jobs. I write pages and pages of thoughts …