I can still remember the day I first went to my psychologist’s office for my first counseling session. I was feeling anxious. My brain had been overthinking for the last few months leading up to my counseling. I couldn’t sleep at night. I ruminated. I was agitated almost all the time. I poured all my frustrations to my trusted counselor, all in 50 minutes. And the first thing that she told me was most of my anxiety and other issues stem from my tendency to be a perfectionist.
"Perfectionism, in psychology, is a personality trait characterized by a person's striving for flawlessness and setting high-performance standards, accompanied by critical self-evaluations and concerns regarding others' evaluations."
My counselor described it as an overbearing mother who pushes me to be the best version of myself thinking that it’s for my own good. I benefit from my perfectionism by producing high-quality outputs, having very high attention to detail, and by actually reaching this point – the Ph.D. But like any overbearing mother (don’t shoot me), at some point, it becomes just that – overbearing. For the past year that I’ve been going for counseling, I always had some new struggles to share and every single one of it stems from my perfectionism. I try new approaches to at least manage it to a healthy level like practicing self-compassion and mindfulness. Some weeks, I succeed, some days I fail. 70% of the time, those failures were triggered by social media. That fucking Instagram.
**
I am part of the social media generation. My opinion on how it affected my personality is real inasmuch as I grew up with its progression. I was eleven when I first connected my Windows 2000 computer to the World Wide Web with a prepaid card, fourteen when I joined MySpace and Friendster, seventeen when I started blogging in Multiply. 2009 was when I finally didn’t have to cheat my birthday to join Facebook, and I was twenty when my inner artsy was awakened by Instagram. My generation joined the advent of these media-sharing platforms that aimed to “share lives and connect people”. It did the job. Moving out of the country at twenty-four, I will always be thankful for smartphones and online group chats for keeping my friendships and sanity intact in the process. But it seems like humans have a knack for exploiting everything that is harmless as they turned all these platforms as instruments to either 1) manipulate, 2) generate money, 3) promote perfection or 4) witch-hunt. Finally, at twenty-seven, I had a burnout from all of it.
As an individual who started using social media to decompress from the real world, I became affected by how they are turning out to be manipulative and, in the end, transforming me. As a young woman earning a salary and wanting to improve myself, I got so excited by internet accounts with almost-perfect lives online. I got so obsessed with their perfect skin while wearing no makeup as per their captions. My perception of a beautiful and empowered woman changed by seeing these busy, career-oriented women purportedly juggling multiple roles in life flawlessly. Fresh out from a long-haul flight yet not a hair out of place, not a single pimple in sight, and still brimming with grace in their allegedly candid pictures. New mothers holding their firstborns, all looking like they came from a salon, not the delivery room. I followed most of them. A few years later, more and more perfect-looking women sprouted like mushrooms on Instagram. More and more twenty-something women joining the New York Fashion Week, with enviable clothes and magazine-worthy photos, when I couldn’t even afford one of their tiny bags. My curiosity turned to envy. I looked in the mirror and my inner monologue kept telling that my whole life needed to be more like them -- more graceful, more filtered, busier, prettier, and every bit of "more". So when life took a toll on my physical and mental health, aka all mental and skin issues from hell broke loose in Australia, I finally woke up to my senses. Social media is manipulating my perceptions. My life was okay. I didn’t need the harmful comparisons with these strangers. Social media is feeding my perfectionism.
These are real struggles of the social media generation. A pre-millennial can brush it off and offer the best solution: quit social media. By now, we can all agree that it is impossible. Until some miracle happens that would start the Great Internet Downfall, I don’t think I can ever quit. I have long accepted that I need to manage my perfectionism, stay online and shield myself from social media manipulations all at the same time. So I un-followed people that plant unkind thoughts. I regulate my internet consumption (or at least try to). I practice self-compassion. More importantly, I hope I won’t be any more complicit in portraying my life perfectly when it isn’t. I regret that my young, show-off and immature-self used social media as a highlight reel too many times.
**
One of my newfound hobbies is people-watching. I see people of all ages, genders, and shapes walking past me. It's amazing how these people are oblivious to my presence as much as I am hyperaware of mine. Sure I may catch a pair of eyes or two, exchange some friendly smiles, but they don’t spend more than a split second, moreover scan me from head to toe, and count how many zits I have on my face. I see strangers, coworkers, and friends who have their own insecurities too. Imperfections. Dissatisfaction. But unless they point out some mole on their face that they are bothered about, or unless they speak about their struggle in speaking English, I will never notice a thing at all. I see them as humans with their own individualities. I realized that even I, a perfectionist individual with high attention to detail, don’t even see imperfections when I look at people – so then why do I have to do that to myself?
