Posted With Caution

Lately it seems as if perfectionism has become a dirty word in our society. It is associated with stress, heart attacks, feelings of superiority, and let’s face it. Bitches. Be they men or women society frowns upon perfectionism. We have to look no further than Martha Stewart to see what kind of hatred we hold for people who are the epitome of perfection, drive, and success.

The reason I bring up this topic is as complicated as the layers involved. On one level, and today’s triggering level, I want to leave my job. This becomes a complicated issue when we look at the fact that on a completely superficial level my job is fantastic. I have a non-demanding boss, the benefits are excellent, it is essentially a part-time job which means it is very undemanding and the pay is more than enough. Yet I am not happy. This is not what I want to be doing and because of that I feel as if I put forth minimal effort. I hate myself for this and yet I cannot bring myself to feel motivated. I’m a right brain person in a left brain job.

Yet whenever I bring this up to my family/friends they chide me for being flaky and “a dreamer”. This is a dream job that some of them would kill for and it seems to me that my not wanting this job is somehow an insult to them. My aunt says that I need to be realistic and underneath her words what I am really hearing is, “grow up”. It has become a majority opinion that “nothing is good enough” for me. I have been hearing this my whole life and for a very long time I tried to conform to their standards, their ideals, and all I ever got was unhappiness. You see the majority opinion formed when I left a man that everyone in my family loved. When they came down on me they came down on me hard and I felt as if they were telling me, “settle. Take all your hopes all your ideals and just forget them” it was if they pulled out a tiny box and told me to get in. I just couldn’t take it anymore. So now I want to leave this job and I can see their jaws clenching and when they respond they hint at the fact that I am saying that what I want is more than what they have so really what I am doing is looking down on them. My cousin told me, “Terra you can’t have it both ways. You either have to be a hippy red neck bum or an intellectual workaholic. You need to grow the hell up”. When I responded, “Why? Who the hell says I have to fit in some custom made box?” he told me that if I didn’t decide I would never be happy, never be successful and never find love. “Terra, you’re looking for something that just doesn’t exist.” So my question is, am I?

John Gray, author of Women are From Mars, Women are From Venus, writes about a man that he met at one of his seminars who complained that he could never find the right woman. He described the ideal woman’s attributes and John responded by saying that he was being unrealistic and looking for perfectionism that no woman could possibly live up to. Reading this passage I have to agree. The man was insane. Further, I recently heard someone comment that the movie Say Anything had ruined romance for all women while the movie When Harry Met Sally had ruined romance for all men. I didn’t know that that many men loved When Harry Met Sally. Curious. But the point is that these movies portray an ideal of love that simply doesn’t exist and people will spend their lives looking for this experience rather than being happy with what they have. I should be happy with what I have. I probably should have married my last boyfriend, after all how many people are really going to put up with a hippy/intellectual/red neck that is anal and messy all at the same time?

And yet, I have to disagree. I don’t think that the problem is perfectionism so much as it is that people have lowered their standards. In Southern California there is a Mexican mayor who says that when he went to college he had to fight his family tooth and nail. Do you remember, Real Women Have Curves? This is apparently typical of Mexican immigrant families. This man, who is now mayor, said that to go to college instead of going to work alongside his family was an insult. It was akin to saying, you’re life isn’t good enough for me. I am better than you. When my cousin tells me that I have to fit in a box what he is really saying is, you are outside of my understanding. You want more and hope for more than I have ever expected and that pisses me off. Well guess what, the idea of conformity pisses me off and the idea that I have to lower my standards in order to be accepted is more than outrageous it is sad.

I am not a particularly intelligent person nor am I especially driven and yet when I was in the fourth grade I tested in the 99th percentile. I was at tenth grade reading level and sixth grade math level. Leagues beyond my classmates. Yet when I take an IQ test I routinely score between 132-142. I am only above average intelligence. My friends are hair dressers, mechanics, body shop workers, stay at home mothers and what might be classified as bums. They live at home with their parents. All of them are incredibly fun and yet all of them will say, oh books and school are not for me. It’s as if because they fit into one box they couldn’t imagine ever fitting into another. I routinely hear my friends say, you wouldn’t believe it, that guy, that mechanic, he is really really smart. Oh, so just because he’s a mechanic means he shouldn’t know how to read? The problem isn’t that we are nation of dreamers, the problem is that we are a nation of underachievers.

You see statistically speaking I should have been somewhere in the middle of that bell curve and nowhere near the 99th percentile. But I grew up in a low income area where children were being raised to be, “good enough”. Those kids were just as intelligent as I was; the difference was that their parents weren’t hard asses like my mother. On the same note, how in the world is Lloyd, from Say Anything, a perfectionist view of men? Ok, now I love Lloyd as much as the next female, but in all aspects he was a loser. He was a kid with no prospects, no aspirations and no career. All he had on his side was that he was a good guy. No, a great guy. He loved that valedictorian with all his heart. Their love wasn’t a perfect love, she struggled with feeling that she was too good for him, they fought, they broke up, he stood in the middle of the street holding up a boombox for a girl who pretended not to hear him. So if you say that this is unrealistic, unattainable does anyone realize that what they are saying is, “accept the bastard on the couch who forgets your birthday, drinks half the paycheck and refuses to watch the kids”. Those kids didn’t live in a mansion, their families weren’t perfect, how is that unattainable? Don’t tell people to dream lower, tell them to be Lloyd, tell them to work harder, tell them to step up to the plate and accept responsibility for their fucking lives.

We are a nation spitting out programs like, American Idol where our instant gratification needs and get rich quick mentalities are satiated on drivel. California’s school test scores are amongst the lowest in the nation and our nation isn’t even doing very well. Across the world we are known as fat and lazy. We take down people like Martha Stewart and call her a mean nasty bitch. Umm, I’m sorry, how do you think she got where she is today? Why do we take her talents and abilities and instead of appreciating them try to use them to smash her down? A person that driven is never going to have the mentality of Suzie Homemaker. Does that mean she is better than Suzie? No, it just means that she is different. It’s the nature of the game people. Some of this goes back to the nature vs. nurture issue. Are my fun friends uneducated because that is really their type of personality or is it because that is what the world expects of them? Would they still be underachievers if the bar hadn’t been set so low? To quote Jeffrey Eugenides from, Middlesex, “Nature gave me a brain but life gave me a mind”.

College admission numbers are dropping. Less and less men are signing up for higher education while more and more women are obtaining degrees. I find this trend disturbing and I wonder why we are imposing a glass ceiling on ourselves? I find it scary to think that there is a permeating mentality that not only should you not have to work very hard in life but that being an underachiever is more than acceptable, it’s expected.

Don't get me wrong, never for a moment do I look down on blue collar workers. That is hard work and anyone who has a desk job and thinks that they are better than the man outside digging a ditch is kidding themselves. They are the backbone of our society and just as necessary as Donald Trump. I have respect and admiration for the man/woman who works two jobs and goes to work half dead in order to put food on the table. I salute all hard workers, all parent’s who are raising children with the idea that if you work hard enough anything is possible, those who are making sure their kids have more opportunities than they had, and each and every man who has stood in the middle of the street with a boombox. There are not enough of you.