In my blogs I have mentioned the mental aspect of having Poretti Boltshauser Syndrome for me. So another one about that. I am an overachiever. I love to achieve things, and to achieve a lot. And I cross my boundaries sometimes doing so. In this blog post I will explain why and how.
As a child my main coping mechanism for me staying behind at some aspects, motor skills for example, was to be overly arrogant. At the time I had no clue why I actually did that. Looking back I realized it was a bad coping mechanism, not having to accept the facts because I was good at other things. Which I was, for the record, but not that good that you have the right to be arrogant. I was good at maths, I was one year ahead in that. I never had issues with spelling, which is part of why I became a writer. Handwriting, well, that wasn’t good. Gymnastics was also bad. But I figured, well, if I did not acknowledge these things going terribly, they didn’t exist. Child logic. So I thought I was good at everything.
At a certain age you realize that you are not the number one most important person in the world. There are other people, and they have qualities as well. Qualities that I did not have. This made me very insecure and made me overly ambitious in the things I do well. I had the feeling that if I could show off what I can do the best, people will admire that and not look at the things I lack. While this works for a few moments, this is certainly not a good solution. However, it made me more down to earth.
The problem is that I always felt like I had to make up for my lacking of motor skills and all. I had to be the fastest, the best in what I could do well. It made me feel this enormous pressure I put on myself, to excel in what I could do best. This lead to me having a burn-out at age 17. These days I can’t even imagine doing the workload I did when I was a teenager, who was also determined to do everything the best. I wanted to go to a good university, study the Dutch language. Maybe even become a teacher, just to show people that I can.
The problem with this is that nobody expected these high standards of me. It was my own insecurity that made me want to make up for all these things. I just couldn’t really accept myself for who I was and instead of working on that, I kept pushing myself to show other people that I had nothing wrong with me at all, while I was breaking down on the inside. I said yes to every assignment handed to me.
I had to learn when to stop. I had to learn when it’s enough. What’s the breaking point. I reached that breaking point at age 17, and had to re-evaluate everything. As of today I still struggle. I still feel the need to make up for something. I still feel like I have to show people how good I am doing, as if they don’t believe me otherwise. Accepting yourself completely is a journey, and I am getting there slowly. People are allowed to see me struggle, they won’t think any less of me. That is the lesson I learned out of it all.
Thank you for reading this.
Alissa