The Hypocrisy of Hypocrites

Imagine this scenario:

A girl looked down at her paper. a 24.5 out of 25. Tears started forming in her eyes. Why did she have to mispronounce that one word in her presentation? She was so close to 100 percent! Sure, it was still an A+, but she just had to go and mess it up for herself. Of course. People kept telling her that she was too hard on herself, but she just wanted to be perfect. Was that too much to ask? It felt like everyone else in her grade was perfect. She felt like she was always in a breakneck competition to outperform everyone in everything. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. She thought she might crumble under the pressure she felt. People told her to follow her heart, and in her heart, she wanted to be perfect. She was doing everything that people asked of her, right? Then why did she feel like a failure? Why was she crying over a missed half-point? She wiped her eyes while the class was praying, hoping that no one saw herself falling apart.

Spoiler alert: that girl was me.

We are disappointed by ourselves constantly.

Maybe we didn’t perform as well as we wished on a presentation or test. Maybe we said the wrong thing at the wrong time. We hate ourselves for failing to live up to our unrealistic expectations for what we should do and how well we should do it. We set standards for ourselves so high that we could never dream of being able to live up to them. Even the people we place on pedestals in our minds would never be able to live the perfect lives we expect ourselves to. We jump to conclusions and judge people as hypocrites for not living up to what they said. As Steven James points out in his book Checkmate, isn’t everyone a hypocrite in their own way? We try to live up to our expectations for perfection and oftentimes fall flat on our faces, and we fail to see how utterly stupid it is to run ourselves into the ground trying to be someone that we’re not. Checkmate has taught me to be kind to myself and to not be quick to judge, as I am struggling with the same things as the people I'm judging. Checkmate made me realize that I will never be perfect and that is okay.