Being perfect isn’t everything.
11th Grade: I was lying on the floor of my bedroom sobbing. The carpet beneath my cheek was sodden, but I couldn’t find the energy lift my head, let alone trod over to the computer to start the task that was causing me such anxiety. It was just a paper. I knew that. Rationally, I knew this ten-page document wouldn’t make or break my future. I didn’t even want to go into history and I couldn’t care less about media during the Vietnam War. Really the only thing riding on these 4000 words was a grade. But therein lay the problem.
8th Grade: I panicked. My soccer coach invited a few rising freshman to accompany the Varsity team to Spain. We were supposed to train all summer so we could “keep up”. I would like to add that my coach was very British, so every thing he said came off as incredibly mean. He could make puppies playing in a field sound menacing. It didn’t help that he was, in fact, mean. Maybe mean isn’t the right word. Let’s say harsh. He made sure you knew if you did anything wrong. Anything. Anyway, this training regimen he expected us to do included things like running two miles in twelve minutes and sprinting twenty lengths of the field without stopping. I don’t know which scared me more: the actual training part or his reaction if I wasn’t up to par.
To make things worse, I spent that entire summer in Canada. It’s generous to call my house in Canada a house at all. It’s more like a summer cottage situated jauntily on a rocky island in the middle of Lake Huron. You have to take a boat to get there. Needless to say, there were no weights, no tracks, and certainly no soccer fields. But I had to train. I had to be perfect.
I spent two hours in full on panic mode when I received the email with the training exercises. I didn’t understand about 50% of the words and knew how to do only about 35% of the words I actually did comprehend. I frantically called our school trainer and wasted three hours of his time while he walked through each and every exercise with me. It didn’t help. The sheer amount of things my coach expected us to do was overwhelming. And nauseating. And exhausting.
I spent that entire summer before we left for Spain constantly stressed and sore. I realized I can’t run two miles in twelve minutes. One time I got to 1.8 miles before my legs simply refused to move. I didn’t get close to perfection. I wasn’t even within reach.
9th Grade: I called my voice teacher the day before the recital I had been working towards for the past three months. I had rehearsed Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” relentlessly until even my dog slowly backed out of the room upon hearing the opening chords. I knew every line. Every chord. Every transition. I had even picked out the perfect “rock star” outfit (which to my ninth grade self was a tank top from Victoria’s Secret—I wish I knew what I was thinking). But it wasn’t right.
I cancelled. I told Mrs. Endicott I had the flu. Or strep. I don’t remember, but I must’ve been convincing because it worked. She told me to drink tea and hung up. The wash of relief that bombarded me was indescribable. I had avoided any potential embarrassment that would result from not living up to expectations.
It took me years to realize that focusing on being perfect was actually bringing about opposite results. The pressure I put on myself crushed any potential enjoyment I could have gotten from learning new history, training for soccer, and performing my song. Eventually I wrote that essay and turned it in, dreading the day I would get it back. Not once did I feel an ounce of pride for conducting months of research and compiling it into a readable (I hope) document. I spent my entire time in Spain worrying that my training was not enough. I never took a second to appreciate the beauty of Barcelona and the delicious street crepes. I never got the opportunity to perform the song I worked so hard on.
Being perfect seems like everything. It seems like if you mess up, your whole future will crumble ahead of you. But would you rather have a future with a few cracks or a completely blank past?
I really enjoyed your piece. As usual, your voice makes it a fluid, easy read and your interjections make the piece interesting to read the entire way through. I like how you separated all of your experiences by age and that they each presented a very different but connected side of the story. One suggestion I have is to put the vignettes in some sort of order. Perhaps I’m not seeing it but it seemed to jump around in no particular order, which was a little confusing. Lastly, I think it might be helpful to title your last section “Today” or something of the sort so that it is immediately clear that you are done with the previous vignette and moving on to the conclusion. Overall, great piece!
Hey Erin, I really loved reading this essay! I thought your essay was very organized and easy to follow, even though you jumped around to different points of your life. I also think your voice and tone were very clear, and I could relate to your essay so well because I knew what you were thinking. I personally like the flow of how you had your thesis paragraph towards the end of the essay rather than the beginning, because I think you had to have gone through all of your experiences to realize your thesis, just like readers had to read through all of your stories to follow your realization which is your thesis. Great job!!
Erin,
Like always, the personal experience you bring to your essays adds a level of concreteness to you argument. I also like that you had that one sentence thesis in the beginning, which together with the title ensured that I knew exactly what the essay was going to be about. The only criticism I have here is that I felt as though the transition into your last paragraph sounded a little abrupt. This is just an idea, but maybe you could date your conclusion as well. It could be the date or the year of those “many years later” or something to help the conclusion follow the overall flow and structure of the essay.
Otherwise, I don’t really have much criticism. Great Job!
I like how you organized yours differently than a normal essay, I think that was creative not to go in chronological order, sort of like Pulp Fiction and that’s recognized as one of the greatest movies of all time. Just an idea though, your ending paragraph seems more like a thesis, so maybe you could move that to the beginning and then answer the question in a conclusion paragraph reflecting on the events that you described.