Opposite Extreme?

This morning I walked out of my bedroom and into a wall of hideousness. The wall then seemed to dissolve and travel up my nasal passages and right smack into the middle of my gut. This stench was not present in my stairwell minutes before. I considered the bathroom off the hallway and my man of a husband who I inhabit my dwelling with… but no, this was not a human smell. In horror, I looked down my stairs and found a trail of poopy litter leading from our guest room down the stairs and all through our living room. Now, we’ve only had Duncan for 4 months and he’s never pooped outside his litter box so i’m not all too familiar with the smell of cat poop. This would most likely be the reason why I did not first assume the rancid smell was what it really was. But boy, did I get familiar with it today. The reason for the poopy litter is neither here nor there and I’m not trying to hang my husband out for embarrassment but this story helps me introduce the purpose of this blog entry. The reason for the poopy litter was because my poor little sir could not go into his litter box without getting his paws full of dirty litter because the litter box had not been scooped in quite some days. And by quite some, I mean 3. Which directly leads me to the point.

When did I become so freakin’ anal??

People who knew me in high school knew that I would always be at least 10 minutes late to anything… (including school whether I was missing the bus or driving myself), I was not detail oriented in the least and would miss things that were very much right in front of me, and I would regularly knock things over and break them/spill them. I did not receive good grades until my junior year of high school and was fine with being mediocre. I had other things that were more important than my education. Now, really, I was not a bad kid. I just had a raging case of ADHD that swept through me on a daily basis and caused me to be a whirlwind of chaos that regularly lost objects like shoes, car keys, wallets and who couldn’t remember if the meeting was at 12 or 1 so to be safe should arrive at 1:30 instead. My best friends became the feelings in the pit of my stomach that said, “How dare you miss that!” or “I can’t believe you did that? How could you be so foolish?” and my favorite, “You’ll never get your life together, Sarah. It’s hopeless.”

My junior year of high school was the beginning of my turning point into the opposite direction. I was sick of the pit of unhappy feelings and my way to deal with said pit was to put things in my life in order. I started doing my homework on time and studying for tests. As a result, my grades shot up to A’s. The feeling of getting an A reinforced the feeling that if I kept going, my life would come together very nicely. I graduated from high school with a good GPA and got into the college of my choice.

College was a bit of a regression at first. I don’t transition well and college is a large change for someone who’s been living at home and attached to her parents for 18 years. I spent much of my 4 years forgetting to pay for parking tickets and letting the massive piles of clothing build up on my usually unmade bed. I became my own individual person and dealt with millions of emotions that marked the various experiences leading me to becoming a well-adjusted (who’s really that anyway??) adult. Through all this my grades continued to sky-rocket, especially by the end of my 4 years. The more A’s I got, the more I was able to squelch those feelings of inferiority and insecurity.

College ended and I moved home. Cue massive transition # 2. Graduating sparked the feelings of a need to be put together, not just in school but in all areas of life. I spent my first 6 months at home cleaning. My parents had just moved and because I moved back in with them, I had a new living space. This was glorious because the state of my room in the house prior to this new house was a nightmare to clean and move out of. Another reason I decided I needed to keep myself together. I cleaned and organized my life. I started finding joy in baskets and bins and decorations. When a transition would usually force me to fall apart and regress back to old habits, instead I organized with a frenzy that surprised everyone I knew. It also caused a discrepancy inside me. Consciously I was working on disorganized chaos prevention. Subconsciously I was still trying to cope with transitioning. I still lost things and would have emotional breakdowns as a result but instead of just moving on, I would internally punish myself. Instead of the feelings in my stomach coming along when I could not control them, my brain started creating more of them. Not only was I dealing with thoughts that tried to convince me that I’ll never be successful, never be able to maintain a clean house, or never live an organized life, I was also creating thoughts that said, “If you don’t do this, you won’t be succesful” or “If you let that go, you’ll start letting everything go.”  

Over the 2.5 years I spent in graduate school, I created in me the ability to live an organized, well put together, successful life. At the time I saw it as a healthy drive. But when I look back now, I see it as also a way to run away from the degrading feelings and thoughts that haunted me. I graduated with a 4.0 and one of the two Academic Honors Awards given to students from my program. I had a room that was extremely well-organized and was taking care of my money and important documents right as they landed in my hand. I would call a company immediately if I received a bill that did not look right. As a result, many times places like Verizon and USAA would give me the money back because of the mistake they’d made or the flub that happened in their system. This was not a money mooching activity. It was making sure that I was on top of things and wasn’t letting other people’s mistakes in the world affect my well-being. The fact that I almost always received positive results from these actions reinforced them as good and necessary to live a happy life.

Anytime those insecure feelings start raging, even now, I start creating a mental list of all that I have achieved. I’ve earned a Master’s degree, I received the highest score on the comp exam out of everyone in my class, I’m married to a wonderful, hard-working man, and I have a beautiful townhouse that I take care of and keep pristine at all times. This seems to work for a while and then a slip up happens on my part or my husband’s part and the world ends. At least, it does in my brain. The past 2 months have taken me on a quest to see what causes my anxiety and occasional bouts of depression. The matter I’m discussing in this blog was not even on the radar as a reason. I’ve wondered about going on medicine again, about keeping busy, about scheduling vacations and fun plans. But hadn’t gotten down to the real, deep reasons.

The deep, real reason is that I’ve awakened a sleeping monster within me. This monster’s name? Perfectionism.

I’ve also awakened his sleeping cousin: Control.

Perfectionism and Control have been in charge of the reins of my brain for almost a year now. Because it’s been over the past year that I feel I’ve gotten completely out of control in keeping control. If that makes sense? Basically, I’ve gone to the opposite extreme.

This enlightenment came from reading a book with my women’s small group. I almost never read the books that are assigned for anything other than classes and even then it’s rare. I’m a read for pleasure instead of necessity kind of person. But this book seemed to be different from the other “self-help” Christian books that I tend to avoid. And it’s proved to be true. The first chapter alone is what brought to my attention that Perfectionism and Control have taken my brain hostage and I’ve sat back in the corner and allowed myself to stay tied up and just watch as they’ve wreaked havoc and changed my ways of thinking.

Instead of relying on the One to be perfect FOR me, I’ve been trying to be perfect MYSELF. This is totally backwards and the reason I keep going headfirst into a wall, not a wall of hideousness but a wall of impossibility, because it’s impossible for me to be perfect, to keep everything in full control, and to prevent anything bad from ever happening. IMPOSSIBLE. And instead of beat myself up for that fact, I need to accept it and learn to cope with it. Rely on my always perfect Savior who’s the reason why I can live an imperfect life and not need to worry about true, eternal falling apart. My new mantra of thinking has become, “Learn from it and move on” or “Ask for forgiveness and move on” or “That might not have been the smartest choice but it’s not the end of the world, move on.” The common phrase in all of this is MOVE ON. I cannot keep a record of my mistakes… or my husband’s mistakes for that matter! We aren’t perfect and the more I come to terms with the fact that it’s okay to not be perfect, the more freedom I feel. The more I’ll be able to look at cat poop on the stairs and instead of pick a fight with my husband over the cleanliness of the litter box I can just say, “Hey, when you get a chance can you clean it? Looks like we left it a bit too long.” And then MOVE ON. No dwelling. No bringing up the past things that have happened. Who cares what happened?

Now, I embark on my journey of learning the balance. The line between healthy control and raging control. The line between cleanliness and neat freak(ness?). The line between keeping things in life orderly and overreacting when we forget to update the budget on time or overspend in one area. And I’m learning to walk around everyday with the knowledge that I’m taken care of and kept under control by my God who’s so much bigger than me that it surprises me why I haven’t given up the control yet. Amazing what types of things the human brain can come up with but also what it can totally miss and filter out sometimes. Even writing this blog post provided some enlightenment in other areas that were not totally clear yet.  If you’ve read this far, I give you props seeing as this is a long post and most of it was my way of sorting the thoughts and ideas that have been going through my brain the past couple of weeks.

And I can now say that the positive thoughts that were discovered today through writing this blog were partly the result of cat poop. I guess there can be positives to letting things go once and awhile 😉