Living with Mental Health | Depression and Perfection

I suffered from depression at high school. This was something that took a lot of time to overcome. There are many things I learned which have helped me overcome depression. In this post I want to focus on just one, which is sometimes an issue for me to this day. I have always been a perfectionist, and I really believe that to do a good job, I should focus on past mistakes. Since I have always considered this to be one of my better qualities, at high school it never occurred to me to question whether this was contributing to my depression. However, I have since realised that there is a right and a wrong way to go about learning from mistakes. And there is a fine line between learning from mistakes, and dwelling on them.

For example, if I said something stupid when talking to a group of people I didn’t know very well, I would tend to not only feel embarrassed at the time, but remember the incident long afterwards. Of course, everyone has some monumentally bad moments in their lives that they will always remember. But at some point I realised that I was keeping a mental list of small bad moments to - and I remembered bad moments much more clearly than good ones. This was because I felt I had to keep going over my mistakes in order to avoid making them again. I think this is where I crossed the line from learning from bad experiences to not being able to let them go.

For example, during my last exam period, when I was incredibly tired and stressed, I left my laptop at a bus stop. Luckily, someone handed it in to security and I was able to recover it. When I went to pick it up, the person behind the desk seemed to think I was a complete idiot (probably not an unfair assessment given the circumstance). The lesson was pretty obvious – if I’m tired and stressed, I’m more likely to be forgetful, so I should just carry it in my bag. But I kept dwelling on the fact that the person behind the desk thought I was an idiot. Feeling bad about this, I started reviewing my mental list of everything I had ever done wrong, and felt worse and worse. After a while I realised what I was doing. With some effort, I put aside the bad memories, and tried to focus on something else (a hot chocolate and an episode of How I Met Your Mother always seems to do the trick!). I haven’t left anything at a bus stop (or anywhere else!) since, but I also haven’t brought up the bad memory. Of course, this gets harder the worse the experience, but I remember a time when a small incident like this would have made me feel miserable for weeks. For me at least, the main barrier was realising that it is ok to let go, and that doing so won’t lead to repeating the same mistakes – just because I don’t feel the need to regularly revisit the bad memory, doesn’t mean I won’t remember the lesson.

Anonymous