Project Description

There’s nothing quite like having a breakdown on a train. We’ve all seen that person on a train, trying to desperately hide their uncontrollable tears. Well, in late April, that person was me. I could not stop crying for three hours on the train ride back from Boston after the April UUA Board Meeting. I, of course, tried to hide I was crying from my seatmate in order to maintain appropriate train ride decorum because I really did not want to be THAT person. So what caused that breakdown?

This was just after the April UUA Board Meeting. I am proud to serve as a UUA Trustee but BOY HOWDY has it not been easy since late March when the controversy over hiring practices erupted that led to the first ever resignation of a UUA President and which sparked a national discussion about a culture of white supremacy in our Association and in our faith. And as a UUA Trustee, I was one of the lucky few that was really at the epicenter of this controversy and tasked with helping to fix it. It hasn’t been easy, it’s been one of the most stressful periods in my life, and it has forced me to grow rapidly…almost like a spiritual puberty on hyperdrive.

So it might come as no surprise that after our in person Board meeting, which I now realize was in the middle of this period of heightened stress and weekly web meetings, I would find the need to cry to relieve that stress. But, actually, that wasn’t the main reason for my tears. The main reason was that I was having a spiritual crisis over, you guessed it, perfectionism.

For the first time in my life, I was being live tweeted as I talked. The UU World was there live tweeting the meeting. Sure, we live stream the Board meetings and maybe like 10 people usually watch. We had over 100 folks watching that Board meeting live. Sure, the UU World does an article about the Board meeting a week or two later, but for the first time they were livetweeting quotes from Board members as it happened. We would literally see quotes of ours from minutes prior show up as facebook memes. It was surreal. And it shut me down.

In this period of heightened stress and anxiety in our denomination, I realized I could do real harm to the health of our Association if I were to misspeak. If I were to speak without having a fully formed thought. Because that imperfect thought could go viral before I had a chance to refine what I said. It triggered every perfectionist streak in me – something I had only joked about before. I felt like I had to be hyper aware of every word that came out of my mouth. And it was awful.

Part of the reason it was awful was that just two weeks prior, I had read a document prepared by DismantilingRacism.org about how white supremacy shows up in institutions. And first on their list? Perfectionism. It’s the very first characteristic of how white supremacy shows up in organizations – the feeling of and the expectation of perfectionism. I felt like I was in a Catch-22 – I needed to dismantle perfectionism to help dismantle white supremacy in our UUA, but I was actively needing to be a perfectionist in our discussions about white supremacy in our UUA.

Now like any good WASP I was about to put aside my feelings while there was work to be done, so during the actual meeting I was fine. But once I had a four hour train ride back home, it all hit. And boy did those emotions hit.

So where did this internalized perfectionism come from in my life?

I really believe that we learn this perfectionism from an early age. Before I became your religious educator, I worked for a tutoring company. And we are taught very young that perfectionism is the standard we should be aiming for. For example, when teachers grade a test, they often start with the base grade of a 100% and then take points away for wrong answers, as opposed to stating with a base grade of 0 and adding points for correct answers. Sure, you would get the same score in the end, but starting with that base score of a 100 and then taking points away gives a very subtle but very real impression that perfection is what you aim for, and if you aren’t perfect, something is taken away from you. You are less because you aren’t perfect.

School teaches us that average usually just isn’t good enough – we get it from our parents who get it from their parents, we get it from our teachers who got it from their teachers, that getting a C, being labeled average, isn’t good enough. Many families reward kids for A’s, for aiming for perfection, but don’t celebrate being average.

I would see kids at my old tutoring job who had B’s and the parents were angry. Kids who had a 1400 out of 1600 on the SAT and felt like a failure. This expectation of perfectionism often has fully taken root by the time our children are in high school.

I see family after family feel like they need to be the perfect family. And if they aren’t, feel some guilt and even some shame that they aren’t as perfect as their peers. Their kids need to be enrolled in pretty much every after school activity imaginable, so they can have the perfect college resume. Going to the perfect church, doing the right and perfect activities that are expected of us rather than doing the activities that give us life and grows our spirit.

I also remember the intense pressure around looks and image, and I still feel that societal pressure today. If you don’t have the perfect body, then you’re an object of ridicule. And if you don’t have the perfect clothes then you’re a social outcast. And I wore clothes from Wal-Mart in high school – after my dad died when I was 10, we did not have a lot of money. I remember waiting with my mom for the social security survivor benefits checks – we’d head to the bank, deposit them, and then go grocery shopping. We just weren’t in the financial position to afford things like name brand clothes – I wore those jean shorts and plain colored t-shirts at school and dealt with the occasional looks and wise cracks.

I still struggle with those societal expectations of having the perfect image, body, clothes, hair, glasses, you name it – I’ve done a lot of self work on embracing myself for who I am but it’s a daily struggle. And I know I am far from being alone in this room with struggling over body self image issues. But I’ve just started to see how it’s connected to wider perfectionism – the wider societal expectations of perfection being applied to my body.

And now we see an actual market developing around embracing imperfection. Brene Brown, for example, has largely become famous because of her advocacy and work around vulnerability and embracing our flaws. There’s a lot of pressure to embrace vulnerability – even to the point where part of our societal expectations of perfection include being perfect about being imperfect. It’s a vicious cycle that’s developed.

So how many of you have ever struggled with admitting you need help, asking for help, or accepting help from someone?  Raise your hand.

Now, out of all of those with your hands raised, keep your hands up if you’ve given help gladly when asked.

I think society tells us that we need to offer help but never ask for it. This feeds into what I’ve heard be called as “the white savior complex” – if we’re taught to see ourselves as inherently better than others, we can offer those people some help. But once we need help, we lose that inherent betterness and we don’t know how to cope with it. I used to always blame it on WASP culture. But the more I’ve learned about this unwillingness to ask for or accept help, the more I’ve realized that it’s a part of that culture academics talk about when they talk about a culture of white supremacy.

As a colleague of mine on the UUA Board and dear friend Christina Rivera says, our fear of asking for help is in itself a symptom of white supremacy.

After I noticed this textbook perfectionism in myself as a result of that Board meeting, I was better able to understand other things about myself. Like why whenever I felt I let someone down that I would lose sleep trying to think about what I could have done differently. Or why whenever I felt like I wasn’t doing my absolute best no matter how long it took, I didn’t feel like I was doing anything of worth at all.

The more I sat with my thoughts around perfectionism, the more I realized how much work I needed to do on myself to get rid of my own expectations of perfection. But not just my own expectations of personal perfectionism, but my expectations of perfection from everyone else. From my fellow staff. From my colleagues. From restaurant chefs. From people in front of me in traffic. From complete strangers on the internet. From, well, I could give you a much longer litany of my own unrealistic expectations of perfection, but it would take another hour or two. Suffice to say, the more I thought about it, the more I saw how this perfectionism showed up in every facet of my life… and that I had work to do.

I first started to confront that perfectionism through pottery.  [This was the Time For All Ages – you can read a little more about my confronting perfectionism through pottery from the UUA’s Braver/Wiser.]   But once I embraced accepting the imperfections in my pottery, I had trouble moving it to other aspects of my life. I was able to compartmentalize the lessons pottery, and geology, had taught me. It took that Board meeting to shock me out of my own compartmentalization and make a commitment to embracing a theology of imperfection across my entire life.

Now, a little hope. Ever since I had to quite abruptly confront my own internalized perfectionism, it’s been on my mind and I’ve been wrestling with it. At the June board meeting right before GA, the UU World was there once more. And sure enough they were livetweeting us again. But you know, it didn’t bother me this time – I realized that if I wasn’t saying the perfect thing, my good enough attempt would be just that – good enough.

We can overcome our internalized perfectionism if we’re intentional. If it helps, think of it as a social justice issue. That’s right – academic research tells us that perfectionism is a symptom and tool for the culture of white supremacy. And we should be trying to dismantle this culture in all that we do to further the beloved community. It’s a justice issue for us to confront our own internalized perfection, our own internalized oppression from this culture of white supremacy, and to abolish the expectations we have for others to be perfect.

And it’s a matter of our Unitarian Universalist theology. UU Theologian James Luther Adams crafted the five smooth stones of liberal religion, one of our core theological documents. And his first smooth stone is that “Religious liberalism depends on the principle that ‘revelation’ is continuous.” That’s right – revelation is continuous – we’re always learning something new. I’ve long since embraced this as a core tenant of my personal philosophy, but I never realized an unspoken corollary to this principle. That if revelation was perfect already, it wouldn’t need to be continuously developing. If our theology were already perfect, we wouldn’t need to keep learning. If we were already perfect, we wouldn’t need to keep evolving.

And science teaches us not to aim for perfection. Impurities are how most gemstones actually get their color. But let’s talk about entropy for a moment. I think any parent can tell you that a tall stack of blocks is not the most stable thing in the world. If you’ve ever played a game of Jenga before, the game where you slowly remove blocks from a structure and add them to the top until what happens? It topples over. Perfection in order is just not stable. The jenga tower is going to fall on the table and scatter blocks everywhere in a disorganized, imperfect mess. But that mess is more stable than the tower – it’s harder to mess up a mess already. Perfection is too easily topped over – the universe tends towards that disorder and imperfection. And the theory of evolution teaches us that imperfections are what lead to evolution – if beings were already perfect, they wouldn’t need to evolve.

So if our theology teaches us we don’t need to be perfect, if science and nature teach us we don’t need to be perfect, what on Earth IS teaching us that we have to be perfect?

It’s our culture. It’s time to dismantle that culture so we can better live according to our values. It won’t be easy. But I hope you are willing to keep on trying, because it will be liberating for all of us. As the song goes, The road will be muddy and rough but we’ll get there, heaven knows how we will get there, but we know we will. And we have to remember to lean on each other – rely on each other to embrace our imperfections. We aren’t in this fight alone. May we all work toward dismantling the culture that teaches us we aren’t good enough and demands perfection. Amen.