When Insecurity comes around.
Re-edit July 2019
Meet Perfect.
My personal resolve to be “good” is almost as old as I am, though I distinctly remember it becoming a conscious endeavor as my older brothers embarked on the perilous journey through adolescence. I watched with intrigue as my siblings tested the waters, learning vicariously through their trials and successes.
I remember the day that my mom and I drove to the bus stop to pick up Mike and found him walking down the street, obviously unaware that we were going to be picking him up, smoking a cigarette. Mike was in the seventh grade and seeing him, Mom slowed the car to a painful pace as she rolled down the window and calmly said “you might want to put that out before you get in the car”.
The blood drained from Mike’s face as he dropped the cigarette onto the sidewalk and clumsily tried to stomp it out, perhaps hoping somehow that she hadn’t really seen it. Although I was only in the fourth grade, I sensed that this was probably a big deal, and I didn’t say a word as he opened the door and sat in the back seat behind us. A cavernous silence filled the car as we drove the short distance home.
I don’t know what happened that night when our dad came home, but I did watch days later as Mike made his choice between being grounded for a month and smoking a pack of cigarettes in one sitting. He chose the latter, and the vision of him sitting across the round table from our dad, his small hands shaking as he lit cigarette after cigarette, has always stayed with me.
I don’t know why I was allowed to witness the torture, but his punishment became my own and I swore in that moment that I would never start smoking. (That didn’t stop me from having a beer at 15, an experiment that resulted in a similar consequence… unlike Mike, I opted for one month’s grounding over drinking the six-pack. My brothers always laughed at that choice. Of course, I eventually did start smoking, but that’s another story!)
The point is this: Mike wasn’t the only one who suffered. As he lit up again and again, my dad remained stoic across the table from him, my mom pacing in the kitchen a few feet away. Despite my age, I understood that my parents felt the painful obligation of punishment. However, because of my age, I didn’t understand that that was simply a part of parenthood, and so I grew determined to minimize whatever suffering they would endure with me.
Every parental smile I claimed, every bit of praise uttered in my direction stoked my need to be better and better until the goal could be no less than perfection. And while my ambition never wavered, being perfect was hard and rare. As I eventually figured out, perfection comes with deception and betrayal, because outside of arithmetic, it’s almost impossible. When all you strive for is flawlessness, you trip over failure and instead run into Perfect’s wicked cousin, Insecurity.
Enter Insecurity.
Ah, Insecurity. I think I have spent most of my adult life building her up in my mind to be the hateful destroyer of Confidence. But Insecurity is really just a terrified little girl who fears that people don’t hear her, understand her, like her, accept her, approve of her. How can I hate that?
Insecurity is not bad, she’s just afraid. She is afraid that she is wrong, that she’ll look or sound stupid, that she will be misunderstood. She shows up, uninvited, at the most inconvenient times, in the most inappropriate places. Places where you’d think she’d steer clear of, simply because there should be no place for her there. But she finds a little crack in the door, makes herself really small and squeezes through, somehow, making herself known. And she doesn’t always look the same, either. Some days she’s wearing the “my kids like their dad better than their mom” hat. On other days, she dons the “I can’t seem please my parents” sash, or worse, the “my husband is getting tired of my shit” shoes.
She’s that little girl at the party that no one invited, but she comes on in to look around anyway. People see her but since she’s not really doing anything wrong, they leave her alone. They even feel sorry for her because she’s all alone and looks adorably pitiful. But the longer the party goes on, the more she dislikes being ignored, and so she starts to draw attention to herself, in small, mostly discrete, ways. She knocks a glass over, or bumps into the tv, making the picture go fuzzy — and that drives you kind of crazy, since you spent an hour working on the antenna to make it just perfect.
Since a little bit of naughty isn’t really enough to get a response, she’ll take to extremes. In the end, she wreaks havoc. But it’s not her fault, and you can’t really scream at her, or fight her or throw her out on her behind, which is what you really want to do. Instead, you sit down with her and talk with her about why what she is doing is not really that great an idea, and that it ends up being more destructive than anything else. She opens her big eyes, nods her head, lets you know that she is really listening to you. Then she thanks you for taking the time to talk to her.
She’s very polite. You don’t even have to show her to the door. She gets up and walks to it on her own. And she was kind of charming in a way, so you’d almost like to hug her as she leaves. And as she does leave, she turns back toward you and smiles a little smile that breaks your heart because you know that even though she understood what you have told her, the attention you gave her was really nice. And sooner or later she’ll be back for another round.
Coming soon: Acceptance.
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