In 2013, I herniated a disc in my lower back. It wasn’t the kind of thing where I bent over or moved the wrong way and threw it out. It was the result of an accumulation of pushing myself beyond my mental and emotional limits at work and beyond my physical limits on my mat. I also ignored the warning signs of the acute pain in my butt that I’d had for 2 weeks leading up to it.
Instead, I woke up one morning with the pain that I’d been ignoring feeling worse than usual and almost passing out from the intensity of the pain shooting down my leg when I tried to get out of bed. In those moments, I was sure I had bone cancer and was going to die. My body finally got through to me in the only way it knows how. Sometimes I need to get clobbered on the head to recognize what’s going on. It’s taken me all these years to begin to recognize how my drive for “perfection” has caused me great injury. In this case, the damage was significant but the awakening was priceless.
Perfectionism is a belief that there is only one way to accomplish something. It’s incredibly narrow, blinding, and based on the false assumption that you are not good enough to begin with. There’s no space to be creative and very little opportunity for learning anything new about yourself. It’s founded in ideas of scarcity and believing that there are limited resources and only one path to success. It feels lonely. It feels like you’re doing all the work and failure feels like a personal flaw. There’s also usually no time for rest and reflection.
Perfectionism is also a key tenet of white supremacy. Ooph, those words feel so ugly in my body when I write them, think them, say them. But when I think about the ways that perfectionism has unwittingly influenced my world view it makes sense. Within a perspective of perfectionism, we judge ourselves and everyone around us by inevitably impossible standards. This limits our ability to appreciate all efforts and abilities and to accept that people have different experiences. Mistakes and not meeting those impossible standards become personal and we feel inadequate or see others as such. It becomes hard to admit we are wrong because that means complete personal failure rather than taking time to learn from mistakes and evolving our understanding with shared wisdom and appreciation. We can feel fearful of speaking up and using our voices for change because we are afraid we’ll say the wrong thing.
Perfectionism and its inherent intolerance is entrenched in our culture and we have been steeped in its messages. Messages that exclude and oppress. It’s evident in common sayings that we don’t even think about, like “No pain, no gain”, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen”, or “The harder you work, the greater your success will feel.” These are all encouragement to override your body’s natural warning systems and to ignore the need to rest and replenish energy—and if you don’t, or can’t, then you are less than.
Does any of this feel a bit familiar to you? If so, take a moment to notice how that feels in your body. Do you feel tension growing? Tightness? A sense of bracing? It can be really helpful to pay attention to our physical responses and sensations when we talk about these issues. Racism is not just about our thoughts but our whole beings and we can use the wisdom and sensitivity of our bodies to recognize what’s harmful and not let it deaden our empathy and humanity.
Hurting my back was a wake-up call. I lost feeling and mobility in my right leg and foot that still lingers today, though much less than when it first happened. I’ve had to learn to be more present for myself and to recognize habits of walking and being that I am free to change and be creative with—not to make myself better but to explore, evolve, and enjoy. I’m taking it one step at a time to show up for myself and others and leaving perfect on the side of the road.
If any of this resonates with you and you want to learn more about tuning into your body wisdom, especially as it relates to walking, check out my virtual workshop The Yoga of Walking coming up on Saturday, November 14th from 10:00-11:30am. We’ll learn about the mechanics of walking, explore our habits of movement and practice some yoga and mindfulness to turn those habits on their head and find integration and coherence in our stride. Cost is $25. You can register here. My Yoga studio is in Vermont but I also have online classes.
Note: You can learn more about perfectionism and other cultural norms of white supremacy here: https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/white-supremacy-culture-characteristics.html or by reading Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, ChangeWork, 2001.
