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When things go wrong it is like the whole world has fallen apart.
- You had your whole life planned out to a tee and then suddenly you realize that you’ve already made it to 21 years old and you life isn’t where you thought it would be at all. You aren’t in the major you thought you’d be pursuing, the people in your life aren’t the people you expected, and now that you realize it, this means that nothing is going to be in order so a breakdown will surely fix it. But, after you calm yourself down you realize your major is perfect for you and your friends are there for you through everything and you really don’t have that much to worry about.
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You don’t take anything, but the best, and when your performance is less than the best you are incredibly hard on yourself.
- You were expecting a perfect 4.0 on your next report card; A’s across the board, but that one class with that impossible teacher landed you with an A-. How could this happen, you did everything you possibly could. Suddenly you start finding yourself saying in your head that you aren’t good enough, and you then start to think about all the other flaws in your battle to reach perfection. At the end of the day, you realize that you tried everything you could and that being the best can only have so much weight in the grand scheme of it all.
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You plan for every little detail throughout the day and expect it to go as such.
- You have calculated that if you leave at 7:15 exactly you can make it to work on time, but you end up behind a car that is going right at the speed limit and your carefully calculated schedule all goes down the drain. You finally get to work and you are a flustered mess and the rest of the day seems to have become just as bad as the morning. You’re then laying in bed that night and realize that you ruined a perfectly good day simply because a car was going a little slower than you wanted and maybe you do need to let up on the planning somewhat, but there’s also a part of you that just can’t.
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You have a thousand things you want to do and never seem to get to them because you’ve expected so much out of yourself.
- Class is 8am-12pm and then you have your internship 12:30-4:30, bible study at 5-6 and then that meeting you were supposed to go speak at from 6-8 and somewhere in the middle of all this you are trying to balance school work a social life and sleep. You have a bucket list a mile long of all the places and things you want to see, but you have your schedule so slammed with everything else that you know in the back of your mind doing things for you are on the back burner. A whole year goes by and you realize not once were you spontaneous enough to go on an adventure to that state park you always wanted to go to and you honestly can’t remember any of those commitments that seemed so important during the year.
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You get frustrated when other people don’t have the same motivation to have everything as perfect as you do.
- When it comes to coworkers, group projects or just friends or family members you often find yourself holding them to the same standards you do yourself. Why don’t they have everything planned out, why is this task not done like you asked, and God forbid you find that they didn’t organize that area the way you would have. They must just be incompetent why did you even waste your time trusting them to get the task done when you could have done their job plus the other four you’ve already taken upon yourself. Eventually you find yourself with 10 tasks because you start picking up everyone else’s when they aren’t done to your standards and you are now stressing out. Why does everyone expect you to get everything done on your own… wait they don’t you had one task to do and you decided to take on all these new tasks that have made you so stressed.
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You take everything to heart when what you do is criticized even if it was the best you could do it wasn’t good enough in someone else’s eyes, so, therefore, it is still not good enough.
- That paper for your English took you 14 hours to write, you read over it and you were convinced it was your best writing yet, surely this is going to receive nothing less than an A. You turn it in and a week goes by and your grades have been posted. Written in bold is a B-. Surely there was a mistake; this was the best you’ve ever done, how could this not receive the perfect grade it deserved. You confront your professor and she explains that the flow wasn’t quite right, there were some grammar errors and she just didn’t like your topic of choice. Your self-confidence plummets. If your professor doesn’t think that your best work is successful than that must mean everything else in your life must amount to failure as well. Never mind the fact that writing is a subjective art form and grading is based heavily on opinion. Or that test you took last week was on a span of eight long chapters and a handful of the questions were not in the book at all. Then you start to realize you are weighing people’s opinions way too heavily and you may be being just a bit unreasonable.
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When people don’t have a plan, are lazy or aren’t on time to things it gives you major anxiety.
- This kind of goes back to not having the same motivation as you do. You expect everyone to follow the schedule that you have laid out and when people don’t move at the rate you were hoping or decide your trip itinerary is irrelevant you start to twitch a little inside. How do people possibly just “fly by the seat of their pants”, “play it by ear”, or “just wing it”. Maybe you should get a pair of those pants that let you stray away from your planner written in pen.
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You can’t just sit around and do nothing; you have to always have a task to be working on.
- Take a break? You? No. That doesn’t happen. There is ALWAYS something that can be done. Always. In fact, when you think about it you are constantly doing something and yet there still isn’t enough time in the day. This makes you pretty impatient when it comes to waiting. You want things done right away and to see results immediately. You don’t have time for things to take time. However, as time goes on you start to realize that your hard work really does pay off even if you didn’t see the results in the first month, and even if it goes unnoticed, to you it means a lot.
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People say they have OCD but it is nothing in comparison to your want for everything to be in order.
- Sure, some things get a little messy when you get caught up in the hustle and bustle of your carefully planned day, but by the end of the week (if that) everything is back in its place. You have a strict way of how things are put, whether that is the closet organized by color or your alphabetized books. The real OCD plays into things not so visible, though, your life is the thing that you pride for being in order most. You compulsively have to make sure everything is going right and it is following the meticulously planned out pattern of events.
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Sometimes you just have to accept that some things do go wrong, and sometimes perfect just isn’t attainable.
- Sure, this one is easier said than done. I have a hard time accepting that I won’t be perfect. In the reality of it all, though, there is only one perfect person who will ever walk this earth, and that is Jesus Christ. You were not created to be perfect, that is our flesh. We will sin, our plan will change because it is not His plan, and people will let us down. However, there is comfort in knowing that there is a God that has our whole life in His hands if we are only to hand it over to him and stop trying to control it.
“All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away” (Isaiah 64:6).
“It is God who arms me with strength and makes my way perfect” (Psalm 18:32).
“As for God, his way is perfect; the word of the Lord is flawless. He is a shield for all who take refuge in him” (Psalm 18:30).
bootandpearls 