I’m trying to silence inner critic who says I ought to be perfect

By David McElroy · August 18, 2019

For years, I wasn’t even conscious of the voice, but it was always there.

“You should have seen that!”

Every time I made an error — of any kind — the voice told me what I “should have” seen or done or not done. The voice knew everything I should have done. Its standard was perfection.

If I missed a question on a test in high school, the voice was outraged. If it was a complicated algebra problem and I overlooked a tiny key detail in the setup — causing me to get the answer wrong — the voice was angry. It wasn’t a chance to learn where pitfalls were. It was a reason to criticize myself, even if I outscored everyone else on the test, because I hadn’t been perfect.

When I played a game — whether it was racquetball or a word game — every mistake was a reason for outrage.

“Why didn’t you see that? What’s wrong with you?!”

When I used to play racquetball, I ruined several rackets in frustration with myself. I was never angry with an opponent. Always with myself. And without realizing it, I slowly taught myself that my very human mistakes meant I was irredeemably broken.

The voice always tells me that others are aware of my mistakes and my failures. They’re laughing at me and losing respect for me because I haven’t been perfect. The voice is sure of that.

I feel like a performer and I’m terribly sensitive to what I feel from the audience. The inner voice is always there to tell me what they must be thinking and feeling about me. But I’m not really a stage performer. It’s as though life is one long performance and I’m always on stage, silently begging the audience for applause and constantly improving my performance to gain their approval.

I’ve talked with you before about my slow path to understanding that I have been a perfectionist. What I haven’t realized is that there are layers of “programming” built into me that relate to this. Not only am I constantly striving to be perfect and to please those whose love I desperately need, I also have this inner part of me which makes that almost impossible.

Nobody expects me to be perfect. It’s hard for me to fully grasp that emotionally, but I can understand it as an abstract concept. When the voice is there to criticize me and belittle me even when I’m being all that I can consciously be, this sets me up to be evaluated by the standards of things which I can’t consciously control.

I’m trying to stop holding myself responsible for what I see after I’ve done or said something. I still try to learn from my mistakes — and ask what I might be able to change in the future — but I’m trying not to tell myself that I’m responsible for seeing and doing everything perfectly in the moment when I consciously make a decision.

I’m also trying to stop holding my present self responsible for what my past self “should have” done or seen or understood. I have a long history of constantly re-evaluating everything I’ve done and spending time in agony over what I realize — in retrospect — might have given me a better outcome.

I’m trying to learn that all I can do is be accountable for what I consciously see and understand. If a past decision was a mistake, I can’t do anything about that now. All I’m responsible for is cleaning the slate and making the best decision I can make at this point.

I’ve never really had trouble treating other people this way. If a person is willing to deal with his or her mistake, I can get past almost anything.

“Hey, I shouldn’t have handled this the way I did,” someone might say. “Here’s why I did it. I understand now that it was wrong, so I apologize. Can we still fix things between us?”

In almost every case, I can accept that and start over. I can forgive and move on, because I know the people I love are very imperfect.

But I’ve never granted myself the same grace. That’s what I’m working on now. It’s not that I want to accept mistakes. It’s not that I want to give myself an excuse when I’m wrong. I simply want to allow myself to be human — and I want to be able to allow myself a fresh start when I need one.

Earlier today, I was talking with a young woman who has tried to kill herself a couple of times already. I asked her if she has any idea why.

“I hate myself,” she said. “I know I don’t act like it, but I really do. I treat everybody else with love and kindness, but I treat myself like dirt.”

I’ve never tried to kill myself. And I don’t hate myself. But I do have a long history of treating other people better than I treat myself. I’m more willing to forgive them. I’m more willing to show empathy. I’m more willing to understand mistakes.

In the Christian book of Mark, Jesus told us the most important command is to love God before anything else. The second most important command, he said, is to love others as we love ourselves. I do understand his point — and it’s one which we all need to learn — but after we start learning to love others, some of us need to love ourselves just as we love others.

Every single day, I need to accept my faults and forgive myself for my failures. And then I need to move forward in confidence — not in shame — to live the bountiful life I was put here to live.

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Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

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