Today, I just need help. Please spare a few minutes.
I need you to please go back to my blog post from Monday, The disease called “Perfection”. I am in the middle of writing an equally powerful, more important response to it which will post on Monday.
If you are like me, this post (and maybe more so the comments that followed), have profoundly influenced you and changed you. There are now hundreds of comments (from the tens of thousands of people who have read it already) from hurting, aching, beautiful people, and what they have to say is both beautifully “real” and achingly haunting.
This is where I need your help. My email is at the top of every page on my blog. Will you please email me the top five to ten comments that impacted you the hardest? I don’t need people’s replies to comments. I’m talking about the “real” comments that immediately hit you, that impaled you, that made you cry.
Truth be told, I never expected this kind of response on this post. I didn’t know if it would spread at all (based on the length of it alone). And now it is my duty to respond correctly and appropriately. That is what I need to focus on right now. Funny can wait.
After you’ve done that, please paste your absolute number one most influential comment from the Perfection post as a comment here and tell us why it impacted you the way it did.
What do you say? Can today be about making something amazing come to pass? Will you help me? Let’s forget about funny for a few seconds and focus on healing and helping. I can’t do it properly without your help.
Dan Pearce, Single Dad Laughing
4:30 PM MST NOTE: When I wrote this post this morning, there were just over 1,000 Facebook shares. In the past seven hours, more than 40,000 people have visited this post, and the “share count” is now at almost 4,000. The comments have jumped from just over 200 to over 450. Perhaps, instead of your top five, just jump to a random page within the comments and read a few pages and tell me which of those jump out at you. The response is so overwhelming that I can’t even stay on top of it right now. God bless you all.
You are doing a good thing!
Wow, this one hit home for me as I have been searching my soul for answers alot lately. I cant tell u how much it has helped me. Thank u so much!!!
I think you just do crap like this because you like the attention.
mine, I can't believe I blurted out stuff people don't know about me and I attached my name to it, then it all didn't seem so bad anymore :)
In the original message, the comment about the 12-year old boy touched me the most. I have a son that age, and worry about how today's society affects him and every other child. There is pressure from parents, teachers, and other children for them to excel in everything they do...be the perfect son or daughter, the perfect student, the perfect friend. They see any minor error or imperfection as an absolute failure and don't know how to cope with the constant pressure to succeed. I've had my son come home from school fighting sadness and depression because he doesn't {play football, have as many friends, isn't as tall, isn't as skinny} as the other kids. We try to reassure, but perfection is hard to overcome in a child, especially when the parents are infected with perfection as well.
We try to teach him that the things that make us unique don't make us imperfect, and that we love him for who he is and always will. It's okay to be imperfect. Our children are our future and we must stop this disease of perfection before it infects another generation. Awareness is a first step.
I like this one:
"I've just gotten so tired of all of the fakeness and "perfection" in our neighborhood (& Utah) that I try to keep myself away from it as much as possible. I've got a mediocre marriage, far too energetic children, and mounds of laundry that take up too much of my energy... I don't want to have to worry about the judgmental, selfish, "perfect" people that make me feel like crap too!"
I like this one because it reminds me so much of me. I have kept self-judging and self-talking and self-criticizing me...thinking that I'd better "beat them to it" so I can be perfect before others have the chance to stick their own labels on me. It's turned me into a person who is always trying to please everyone else and worries about the things that don't matter instead of worrying about me and taking care of me. I say "yes" way more than I say "no" because I think saying "yes" makes me a good person and saying "no" makes me a jerk.
Here's the kicker: doing all of these things has caused me to damage every relationship I care about. Ouch, huh? I would've thought I would have done the opposite because I was so giving and caring and self-sacrificing. Yeah...not so much. In the process of trying to be something I'm not (perfect), I've alienated people, I've not trusted people, I've hurt friends and probably family members too. Not what I wanted and not what I want to keep doing.
Thank God there's hope. Thank God it's not too late for me to start doing something different TODAY. Thank God for Dan, who dug deep, found the balls and wrote this blog post so my friend could find it and I could read it. Because the truth is that I never would've found it on my own. Thank God I get another day to try again and to find a better, happier path. Thank God that, if I choose, I don't have to do this healing process by myself.
I saw your blog posted on a friend's facebook page and got curious. As a teacher, I am always looking for interesting things to have my kids read to stimulate their brains. I figured this essay would be a feel-good type of essay where you tell us to buck up, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and get'er done! I thought that it would be a trite litany of ways to make yourself a "better" person. Instead, I found myself staring into my own heart and recognizing the fact that I, too, am infected with perfection disease.
I am fat. No, really. I have been struggling with my weight since I hit adulthood. I started losing a good amount of weight then got pregnant with my son. I did really well until I got hit with bedrest and the stress of being pregnant made me gain a huge amount of weight (mostly water...I could barely keep anything down most of my pregnancy...but people don't let facts stop them from making assumptions).
Since he came, I've worked so hard to lose this weight. I've lost a total of 30 lbs but I've barely made a dent. I should be 180lbs. Instead, I am 328 lbs. I see these mothers who have kids then are back to perfection within weeks. It's been a year for me and I'm still disgusting. I've tried every diet, work out, etc. I'm facing surgery now because honestly...it's my last option. Well, that or killing myself and I would like to get to know my son before I die. I don't want to look like this. I don't want to be embarrassed to wear a dress or a swimsuit or to be seen in public while not wearing a burkha. I want to wear the pretty, girly stuff with polka dots and to ride roller coasters and to fit into an airplane seat so I can go to Europe. I DON'T WANT TO BE FAT ANYMORE! So quit treating me like I'm fucking Henry VIII and gorging myself. I barely eat, exercise like a fucking demon, and hate myself for still looking like Jabba the Hut.
I am also under pressure to be the perfect teacher. My kids must excel. All of them. Even the kids who can barely put their names on their papers without being told 500 times and given a map. I must be the perfect employee who doesn't stand up when something wrong is being done that will hurt us or the kids. I must have the perfectly decorated classroom that will delight the kids and parents (who never show up, by the way). I must be Joe Clark/Jaime Escalante/Michelle Pffeifer at all times and "save" my kids. I must act as teacher, friend, confidante, parent, conscience, social educator and authoritarian all at the same time. It's a difficult balancing act...the things I hear from my kids that's going on in their homes...the struggle they face to be perfect themselves...I cannot put that pain into words.
As a parent, my kid must be walking/reading Shakespeare/eating caviar and lobster/running marathons at age 1 because your sister's friend's cousin's uncle's daughter's best friend from kindergarten's kid was walking/talking/modeling at age 3 months while holding down a CEO's position at GM. Just because he just got his first tooth and still wants to hold onto something when he walks doesn't mean he's functionally retarded or less than your kid. So, F off.
There are days I don't want to be on this earth anymore. There are days where I think "if I wasn't here, my husband could marry a woman who could really make him happy, one he wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen with in public. One he deserves." I think, had I not had my son, I would have killed myself. I still consider it frequently, but I don't imagine myself going through with it or plan it out anymore.
Anyway, sorry for rambling. Thank you for posting the blog. I appreciate it very much.
Shooting for perfection but missing horribly...
Heather
So much I want to say and so little space and time to do it in. What an awesome message!! I think I love u, I hope u don't mind me saying so. I have been trying to share a similar message for years, and it's so important to make sure that our children hear and understand it. I have talked to people from all over the country, just cuz they needed a friend to talk to.People will share things with me that they wouldn't tell a counselor or family member, EVER!! but they know that I am not gonna judge them, or tell stories about them. People need to be able to connect with other people, to reach out in the darkness, so to speak, and find a friend.
BTW, I need to share this before I go. My daughter says our family functions very well with our dysfunctions. We have even learned to embrace them. wink, grin, and giggles
This is the girl who is greatful to "@madwomanmeg" for posting a link to this article on
twitter.
She is greatful; it is the only way to be.
She is grateful to have found this blog, Single Dad Laughing.She is greatful that he spent 12 hours on his post.He inspired her to spend almost 3 hours on her response.I am a girl who feels like a very heavy weight has been lifted off her chest.
She has decided she hates the idea of Pefection.
Perfection sucks.
Excuse my language but, FUCK PERFECTION!
She is grateful that you are reading this.
What would you do, if you knew you could not fail?
- Robert H. Schuller
Gina, beautiful post. Thank you for sharing it. Thank you for being real. I hope that it hits home to your readers.
She was
confused about why her boyfriend treated her with the same love and respect he treated her
with when she was "skinny".She thinks this past year tested their relationship; it passed
with flying colors.This is the girl who is OVERWHELMED with joy that she found this loving
man and will have the pleasure of spending her enitire life with him.This is the girl who is
finally refusing to let her irrational fears hold her back any longer. She is willing to
pursue her dreams despite her fear of failure.
I am the girl who let out a huge sigh of relief when she finished writing this post.
I am the girl who hope's that this post will in some tiny way help someone else to escape
her ridiculous fears.
This is the girl who purposely "overslept" many many mornings so she wouldn't have to deal with these problems, She is the girl who stayed with him so long because she didn't know who she was without him. She used to blame him for how she felt. She finally realizes it was NOT HIS FAULT, she let him make her feel this way.She believes he was (and surely still is) a good, kind, and loving person. To this day she (even though it's been ten YEARS )regrets how she ended things; she regrets how much she must have hurt him, He had is own reasons for feeling and acting the way he did, we all do.This is the girl who's weight has gone drastically up and down over the last 8 years,ranging from 97 to 130lbs.(It is so hard to
admit she once weighed 130 lbs.) This happened because she would try to cover up her
feelings with food. This is the girl who just 7 months ago weighed 110lbs (now she is 97).
She was disgusted with herself, she couldn't fathom how her boyfriend could still love her
while she was "fat".Side note: 110 lbs is a perfectly healthy weight for her height.
A girl who still struggles with this everyday, She feels happier when she looks "pretty"'(or feels pretty) this feeling is common, Whats less common, is the disgusting obsession she used to have with feeling "beautiful" This is the girl who used to hide all of her "imperfections" because she sometimes felt that she wasn't good enough to be liked for who SHE IS and NOT who she APPEARED to be. This is also the girl who stayed w/ her high school boyfriend for way to long.She did this even though his insecurities led him to be rude to some of her girlfriends, or at least the one's he felt he was competing with. What if she loved her best girlfriend more? This is the girl who felt sick to her stomach each morning at school because she didn't know how to deal with this.
breath, do, be
I am a girl who struggled w/ social anxiety and depression all throughout high school. & even into her early 20's. I am the girl who desperately tried to hide her anxiety,so others wouldn't think she was weird or weak.This is the girl who used to only feel comforabe when she was with her oldest and dearest friends, because she could be her REAL self with them (she still wanted to please them though). This is the girl that sometimes felt so incredibly down that she could not pull herself out of bed.But the next day she would wear a nice outfit and spend extra time on her makeup, that day she was "happy". I am the girl who needed to look and feel beautiful everyday, she needed a few compliments each day to get by, to feel validated. On days when she didn't look "beautiful" (or didn't feel beautiful) she was quiet and withdrawn, feeling she wasn't worthy of being liked that day, A girl who used to base so much of her "self" on her appearance.
just reading all of these posts made my heart both happy and sad at the same time.. i want to thank you for inspiring me to be so brutally honest w/ the readers of my blog. Here is what i posted:
This isn't from the comments others have left... but the one you made in the post - "How could I make my suicide look like an accident? If I kill myself, I don't want anybody knowing that I ever had any problems."
It isn't me anymore for many years, but it was me half a lifetime before. I didn't realize what caused me to think that. I do know a lot better now.
So for me, that hit home to realize all the truth in what you've said. I know other folks who have died while on a hike... and I will never know if it was really an accident or not, but I try to think of the better.
Mel, that's powerful, thank you for sharing.
Not to take away from the many moving stories that were posted, but I have to be honest and blunt - I have neither the time, nor the inclination to pick my way through 500+ posts. That's just too many to choose from, keep track of, or wrap my head around. So I'll comment on the only story that really mattered to me: the one by the original poster. Yours.
The two examples you used of the 12-year-old kid and pregnant teen hit me the hardest. First of all, we've had to deal with a pregnant daughter, and tried to tell her we loved her and would support her only for our overtures to be pushed aside and her baby to be dumped on us. To make a long story short, we feel we really got used (but really don't mind the baby, we consider him an unexpected blessing despite the circumstances).
Second of all, the other story about the 12 year old feeling unloved and worthless struck a chord too (minus the masturbation part). We have a nine-year-old nephew being raised in a moderately dysfunctional household and basically made to feel worthless and like he can't do anything right, no matter how hard he tries, by certain members of his immediate family. My wife & I take him under our wings whenever we can and try to tell him that we love and support him, and he IS worth something, but I fear how his teen years are going to turn out when the hormones kick in and stir up all the repressed anger, sadness, and low self-esteem in him. Sad situation, and we do all we can, but I fear it may not be enough.
Great post, and hope to see more like it. Because they get me thinking.
Haha, Dave, see my reply above. When I first wrote this there were barely 200. I agree, 500 is way too many. Even 200 is cumbersome. But, more than anything, thank you for your feedback here. Your nephew will never forget your kindness and it will play a key role when he learns who he really is.
I sat and cried as I read so many posts with such pain. I read your pain, and it really hurt. I used to babysit you when you were little, before Carissa went to school. You've turned into a wonderful man, and turned your own heartache into help for others. Yes, you make me laugh hysterically, but I have sensed deep pain that you let your laughter hide. Thanks for sharing that. MY own pain (like so many others who commented) comes from being there for everyone else and not having enough left of me to go on. I'M always the one people call to help. Don't get me wrong, I really do love helping others. I'm a full-time caregiver to one who's in pain every minute. I am expected to be patient and loving and long-suffering. I have the last one down pat. Sometimes I feel like I am going crazy giving everyone every last drop of me. Do I have to give up everything I want to do, even if it's to go off by MYSELF to regroup? Some days I feel turned inside out from giving, giving, giving, and then going off to work. I can't even go to bed when I want. That is what I would consider my number one hit-me-in-the-heart- people feeling inadequate and losing themselves.
Now I'm very curious who used to babysit me that also reads my blog!
Thank you for your sentiments and thoughts on this. You're amazing for what you do.
I don't think there was any ONE comment that made me think more than others. As we've "discussed" I had a bit of a different take on it, as I thought it was more an issue of "Perception" rather than "Perfection". I will be happy to cut and paste my response post to you via email (I think even I can figure that out...maybe) if you'd like it, but I'm not sure that that's what you're looking for. I just don't want to flood your email, if it's not what you're looking for. -J
Yes, I did enjoy your perspective. Thank you for sharing it.
I posted on my fb page and said that one of the problems in our churches today is when people use the Christian "F-word". People often ask, "How are you?" and the answer is "I'm fine" - instead of I've hurting, I'm scared, I'm at the end of my rope - Your story encouraged me to be REAL. Thanks!
Love that comment! It is so true!
Melissa, simple, but powerful. Thank you.
You know, Dan, I can't pick the "best" one or the top 5-10. It's like judging people for who's got the most pain and which story describes it best. Perhaps, for me, the "best" of it is merely that we are all human and share the imperfection of such and that you have provided a forum for people to clear themselves of their stories. If we can talk about them and open up, we can release them and then we can learn to tell our stories differently and transform. Perhaps, instead of focussing on the pain of imperfection, we can embrace the differences and just love each other for being...exactly as we are! We are all beautiful in our imperfection!
Beautiful thoughts, Caroline.
I love this comment. :)
I was unable to read all of the posts today though I surely will....if I didn't have to get to work I'd sit here and absorb every last one right now....but I can't....of the ones I did get to read these are the ones that impacted me most....
i once went three weeks without eating actual food. everyone would ask how i was losing so much weight. but you can't just tell people you don't eat food, now can you.
Message #1 of 2: I want to comment anonymously because there is so much power in what you have just written and I want to be real but I am not ready to be so real that I put my name on it yet. A lot of my family and friends read your blog.
Everybody loves me. I hate myself most of the time. I hate that I never feel adequate as a wife or mother. I do sit at home and cry when I'm all alone sometimes. I put on a happy face for everybody around me. I do not know why I often hate myself. I feel fat and ugly even when I am looking my best. I hate walking by the magazine racks at grocery stores. I know they are fake, but I still do everything I can to look like them, but I never can.
The thing I hate myself the most for is that I am trapped. Everybody thinks I'm perfect and talks about me like I'm perfect. I constantly feel this pressure to live up to everybody elses expectations and a lot of the times I just feel like I'm nowhere close but I still pretend to be.Message #2 of 2: I am that person that everybody else thinks is beautiful but I never do. I am that person that everybody else thinks is a perfect mom, but I yell at my kids way too much. I am that person that says yes to everybody and goes to everything when a lot of the times I wish I did not have to.
I am going to reread your post right now and try and work up the courage to be real today because after reading it I can see that I have been hurting myself and those around me. I am not perfect and I don't want to be anymore.
Sincerely yours, a mom and wife infected with "perfection"
Thank you Susan, I really appreciate you sending those to me. Very helpful.
You are beautiful! Gratitude to you for loving people so much you recognize and respond to their pain and need. Thank you for taking responsibility for how your words have touched others and for being proactive in your desire to serve!
Yes, Caroline, and when I wrote this there were only about two hundred. Last I checked that number has more than tripled. Yikes.
Anyway, you're welcome. Thank you for your post. :)
I'll get to it sometime today :)
Awesome, thank you!
Is it okay if I send you the information tomorrow? I want to do this, but I want to make sure I really read over what everyone has to say. I can't wait to see what you have in store for us on Monday.
Absolutely! Thanks Salt!