How to Succeed and Still Feel Like a Failure

Last night I rented Black Swan.  I fell in love with this movie from the very first time I saw it.  There are so many parallels to Nina's journey and my own, but I'm going to try to focus on just one: the pursuit of perfection.


Is there anything so dangerous as the pursuit of the perfect?  Even when we logically know that perfection is impossible, many of us keep pushing toward it (to our own detriment).


My desire to be perfect stems back from as early as I can remember.  My most vivid recollection is coming home from school, excited to show my dad that I made a 99 on an exam.  I ran up the stairs, a broad smile across my face, and showed him the paper.  His response?


"Where's the other point?"


I was crestfallen.  I was at a loss for words.  I didn't even know how to answer that question.  I don't even remember what the exam was about or what it had proven that I had learned in school.  But the life lesson I learned that evening stuck with me:


If you aren't perfect, you are nothing.
If you aren't perfect, you are worthless.
If you aren't perfect, you don't deserve my attention.
If you aren't perfect, you don't earn my love and affection.


Ever since, it's been an uphill battle.  I'm like a donkey pulling a cart, chasing a carrot that remains just out of reach.


When I played in the school orchestra, I was usually first chair in my section.  I barely even had to practice; it seemed I had a natural ability.  But I never enjoyed it.  I performed in constant fear of making a mistake.  One night, after a performance, my dad told me, "You have to stop making all those faces when you make a mistake.  If you didn't make those faces, no one would even know that you messed up!"


I assume these were supposed to be words of encouragement.  Instead all I heard was:


Everyone knows you are screwing up.
You can't even hide it.
It's written all over your face.
Everyone can see that you are a failure.


As a kid, I don't remember much as far as real encouragement, praise, or compliments from my parents.  I do remember being criticized for how I walked.  I remember being criticized for how I sniffled.  For how I had trouble grasping the concept of "decimals."  How I couldn't seem to learn to drive stick shift instantly with my dad in the passenger seat next to me, yelling.  How I never finished anything I started.  How I was lazy.  How I "faked" every headache or ailment that I ever had, so much so that my mom threatened to change my name to "Mona" because I moaned about my aches and pains all the time.


Yet through all of this, I was excelling at nearly everything I attempted.  But none of it ever meant anything to me, because deep down it was already ingrained in my head that I should be able to do better.


It makes no logical sense for a child to believe that they should be good, no-- perfect, at everything.  Yet that's what I tried to do.  And it was exhausting.  Physical and emotionally.  And even spiritually (in that I didn't have much of a spirit left).


This perfectionism, I believe, played a huge role in the manifestation of my bipolar disorder.  Yes, of course, I know there's a genetic component (does having shitty parents count?), but I truly believe that had it not been for certain circumstances in my life, the disorder could have remained dormant.


But when I look back at it (and listen to my husband's recollection of the events, which are much clearer than my own), I began to unwind with one simple phone call.  One day in early summer of 2004, I received a call from the dean of the law school where I was planning to attend that fall.  We're talking one of the best law schools in the south.  He called me personally to offer me a full ride for my J.D.-- a scholarship extended to only three people in every 1L class.  It was a scholarship that you couldn't even apply for and that I didn't even know existed.


Needless to say, I was ecstatic.  And it was all downhill from there.


It wasn't more than a few weeks from the day of that phone call to the day that I was admitted ("voluntarily")  to a psychiatric ward, suffering from mania with psychosis.


I had worked so hard for so long.  Being a lawyer was my dream.  It meant everything to me.  Even after that awful summer, weeks in inpatient psychiatric care, more in outpatient, living with my parents (that sure didn't help)...I still forced myself to go to law school.  I moved to the city where the school was located, even though my parents were still nervous about me even being able to drive a car.  I showed up at orientation and on the first day, even though my psychiatrist thought I wasn't ready.  I studied my ass off...for two and a half weeks.


I turned my first assignment in late.  I read every line of my reading at least ten times and never seemed to comprehend a thing.  I fell asleep in the library.  I was scared to death that the professors all had rosters that had the names of the three people who were on scholarship marked with little asterisks that meant: 'This person needs to prove themselves.  We're giving them a free ride.'  All without realizing that I already had proven myself.


So I quit.  Or, in my head, I failed.  Miserably.


Yes, I have plenty of excuses.  Obviously the trauma I had been through, not to mention the fact that I was on LOADS of medications...it was a miracle I could even function at the level that I was, let alone attempt something as difficult as law school.


To this day, I still feel like a failure when it comes to law school, to my dream.  And you know the funniest thing about it?  One day in class (it was Property, I remember), I was called on (Socratic method and all that; you never knew when it was going to be your turn).  I had the floor for at least half the class as the professor drilled me with questions.  I was too scared to be scared, if that makes any sense.


Yet, when class ended and we all filed out, no less than five different people came up to congratulate me for doing such a great job!  Even with my official diagnosis, the summer I had gone through, the drugs I was being "forced" to take-- I still managed to impress!


So why did I still feel like I failure?


* * *


I recently read a great blog article on leadership that you should check out: 3 reasons to kiss being perfect goodbye

How I Went From "Happily Married" To "Uncertainly Separated"

I've decided that today I will post the letter that I wrote to my husband that got me to where I am today: living on my own (well, with my cats) after only 2.5 years of marriage.  There's obviously much more back story left to tell, but let me preface it with this:


My husband is a sex addict.  He broke the trust in our relationship many, many times.  Luckily (as far as I know, anyway), the acting out was never with another person-- it was with the internet, with pornography.  Almost exactly a year ago, the shit hit the fan when I discovered that he was still engaging in behaviors that he had promised me he would stop.  We separated briefly and began attending marriage counseling.  I agreed to stay with him (despite all the research I had done on annulments and divorce), and in addition to couple's therapy we each had our own therapist.  My husband began attending Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA) meetings and prior to this current separation had recently received his nine month sobriety chip.


Despite all the work we were both putting in and despite incremental improvements, our relationship was incredibly rocky.  His codependency was getting worse, and I was withdrawing and avoiding him.  Our sex life was non-existent.  I was compulsively reading books on how to improve my sex drive and doing anything I could think of to save the physical relationship.


Then one day, I was feeling overwhelmed-- about our cluttered house, of all things!  I was so upset; I think frustration about our relationship combined with feeling like a "bad wife" for not keeping the house clean (and not having sex with my husband) were dragging me down.  I was nearly hysterical as I tried to explain to my husband how our physical surroundings were negatively affecting my mental health and that I was so overwhelmed that I didn't know where to start.


Tears streaming down my face, my husband decided that it would be a perfect time to remind me how sexually frustrated he was (like I wasn't constantly aware of this).  He said, "I feel like I can't even touch you."  I sat listening to the verbal onslaught, his words stung like slaps across my face and my tears started to burn my cheeks.  I could not believe that he thought that this was the appropriate time to bring this up.  I couldn't believe, for that matter, that he would EVER bring this up considering that this topic weighed over our household on a daily basis.


I just couldn't do it anymore.  I needed to get out, to breathe.  I wrote him a letter that I ended up giving to him after we discussed the separation, mostly because I wanted him to know how hurt I was.  Here is that letter:

Michael,

We need a break.  I no longer feel that I can give you the level of attention you need.  I feel like I am trying to fill a bottomless pit and that is an impossible task. Despite (what I believe to be) my best efforts at physical intimacy, I am time and time again faced with the realization that it isn't enough.  This further reinforces the feelings that overwhelmed me during the first 1.5 years of our marriage-- that I was not enough and would never be enough to satisfy your physical and emotional needs/demands.  I feel as though every effort I make to enhance this part of the relationship is countered by reminders that it just isn't enough.

I am done feeling inadequate and I am done doing things that make me feel uncomfortable in hopes that it will be enough to keep you sufficiently satisfied and "off my back about it" so that I can have time to deal with my own issues.  I am sick of having a constant (nearly daily) reminder that I am the cause of your frustration, loneliness, and feeling unloved. You will never feel truly romantically loved by a partner if you continue to tie your entire self-worth to that person's physical and verbal interactions with you.  You will also never feel truly loved by anyone until you truly love yourself.  This is something that, as you know, I am also struggling with.  But I know that I will never be able to truly love myself if I continue to acquiesce in situations in which I am uncomfortable only to be reminded a day or two later that it wasn't enough.  I do not want to be responsible for making you whole, especially when I feel that spending time with you makes me less whole.

I realize that I am not blameless in this.  But I think that in a much different way than you might imagine.  Rather than feel guilty for not being more physical with you, I instead take the blame for allowing myself to ever feel guilty about it. I regret allowing myself to fall into the thinking that sex is "the most important thing" and the barometer against which I measure the success of our recovery, both as individuals and as a couple.  Rather than accepting and really believing that sex is just the "cherry on top," I repeatedly berated myself and suffered self-imposed guilt and blame for being the one who was slowing killing the relationship (guilt and blame that were constantly reinforced via physical and verbal pressure from you, including more subtle forms of pressure like pouting and withdrawal).

I have decided that I will never be successful in improving my self-worth if I am in a situation where my inward-focus is interpreted as "not loving my husband" or "not trying hard enough to fix this marriage."  Perhaps you will say that you don't think these things, but I do and the thoughts are reinforced through our everyday interactions.  There is no way I will learn to value myself surrounded by constant reminders that my only intrinsic value is my ability to make another person feel whole/complete/loved.  That is not all I am good for and it is not my job.

Yet again, I let myself believe the lie that if I truly forgave you for the pain that your addiction caused, I would be willing to engage in a more physical relationship with you.  But this could not be further from the truth.  I am learning that the key to getting past this is not to throw myself into a sexual relationship that I do not want with the person that hurt me. Instead, I need to build up my own self esteem and value myself to the point where I realize that I have more to offer than my physical body.  I regret being so disillusioned that I thought that if I could just fix the "sex thing," everything would be fine.  How did I ever expect myself to want to engage in sexual relations with someone whose words and actions constantly reminded me that that and that alone was necessary to show him that I loved him?  It's no wonder none of it was working-- I was trying to persuade myself into having sex with you to prove to myself that sex wasn't the only thing you wanted from me! How foolish I have been.

I honestly don’t know what the future of this marriage is, nor do I even know what I want it to be.  On second thought, I do know a bit of what I want it to be.  I want my marriage to energize me, not drain me and leave me emotionally exhausted.  I want to look forward to being with my husband, not dread it.  I want to feel valued for something other than my sexuality, not reminded that the  only way for my husband to feel loved is for me to "give in" to situations that make me uncomfortable.  But mostly, I want to be a whole person who is married to another whole person.  I don’t want to be anyone's mother, therapist, provider, or motivation.  I want to be a supporter, yes.  An advocate, yes.  A respected friend, most of all.

And somewhere along the line I think we lost our friendship (which probably isn’t a bad thing considering how unhealthy and codependent our friendship has been from the very beginning).  I don’t feel like we have ever had a healthy friendship, which is not to say that forming one is impossible.  But it is certainly impossible if one of the conditions of the friendship is that one person is expected to validate the other's self-worth by "putting out" on a regular basis.  That's not what friendship is about.  And I really do want a marriage that, at its core, is a friendship.

Anyway, I am sure all of this is a bitter pill to swallow.  I apologize if it seems that I am blaming you for all the issues we have at the moment.  I am determined to take a moral inventory and accept and own all of the things that I have done to contribute to the current state of our relationship.  But this (along with the other work I need to do) cannot occur in our current environment.  I feel that my objectives can only be achieved alone.  And for that I need time.

I realize that I am basically giving you no real option in this proposal.  I hope that we can agree that a trial separation will help both of us decide how/if this relationship should move forward.  If you are not willing to accept this proposal, I must tell you that I do plan on separating anyway.  But I feel it would be much more productive if we did so on mutually agreed upon terms and conditions.  My hope is for us to discuss these conditions sooner rather than later so that we can initiate this separation period ASAP so I (and you, if you so choose) can address the personal issues that are making it so difficult for me to see the value in continuing this relationship.  The sooner I (we) have time to thoroughly (separately) assess ourselves and our roles in this relationship, the better.

Love, 

Olivia

My Journey - A Brief Intro

Today marks the first day of the rest of my life.  I know it sounds trite, but that's really how I look at it.

My husband of 2.5 years and I separated today.  I moved into a condo across town with two of our cats and he stayed back at home with the other and our dog.  I signed a six-month least at the place I'm in now.  Why?

I'll elaborate with all the gory details in a later post.  For now suffice it to say that I'm an addict, he's an addict, we're both co-dependent (though at different levels), and we needed time apart to ensure that our marriage would have a chance.

I plan to use this blog to chronicle my trials and tribulations through this journey.  I hope that others may learn from my experiences or at least be entertained by them ;-).  I know that there will be good days and bad days, but I hope at the end of this experience that I will be a stronger person.

I'm new to this whole blogging thing, so I assume and hope that Trust the Flow will evolve over time.  If you have any suggestions on how to improve the blog, or on particular topics, feel free to comment below.

More juicy background information to follow...and hopefully some insight and healing, too.