Fighting with Frustration of Imperfection

I haven't been writing blogs since this semester. It's a stressful beginning, so I haven't got the time and good quite mood to think and write logically. I've been taking in too much information, and felt the "unbearable heaviness of being", but they are all good and thought-provoking information, and I believe this is the process of growing up and getting to know who I am and what I can do better and better.

I want to talk about my feeling about imperfection. It starts from this controversial book published January this year, Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. This is a book about strict Chinese parenting techniques: raising perfect children. I personally grew up in the similar culture of pursuing perfection. However, the same as most other parents, my parents didn't take things to such an extreme as Amy Chua did. They didn't want to take things to extreme, nor they were able to. My parents are just two of the millions of ordinary Chinese parents, and they are not professors of Yale like Chua is. They were still fighting for the money to get their children good food and good schooling at least by the time of 1990s, and not all of them have enough money to get their children good teachers to teach them playing piano and violin. Amy Chua stands for the middle-class Chinese American elite parents in America, not parents in China.

The case for me, is one that pursuing for perfection but frequently frustrated by imperfection, which is different from the perfection of Amy Chua's children. Although I did learn playing piano, but my skills are not even closer to Chua's children at all. As a result, I grew up looking for perfection, but never get it, or never feel it's enough (if it's enough, it's not perfection). Because I did not get enough pressure from my parents to be good at playing piano, I am not good at it. Also because of the boring teaching methods of my piano teachers, I lost my love for playing piano. Now the results are a piano covered with dust, maybe a little bit of appreciation for music, and what's worse, the frustration that I will never be good at music and the jealousy to children like Chua's who can play piano very well. This frustration of looking for perfection but never get it is not only restricted to playing piano. It also influences other part of my life, such as I feel I am not thin enough, I am not pretty enough, I am not creative and smart enough, because my boring education has "educated me out of creativity", I don't know how to play video games, and I don't know how to dance and sing elegantly, etc. These kind of negative feelings would flood to me every now and then especially when I feel lonely, or I am not satisfied by my unproductive work. This is a result of early parenting and the education I received. Another clue I got from recently read the William Crain's book about human development theories (I love this book, it's very well-written, and easy to read and enjoy, it's also a good parenting book, I think.) is that I was an ambivalent insecure-attached baby according to Anisworth's Infant's Secure-based Behavior Theory.

Learning how to deal with the frustration with imperfection while still have never-ending energy to pursue perfection is a life-long project for me, and I am getting better and better at it while I learn more and more different opinions upon this from different people with different culture backgrounds and get more and more nice, warm-hearted, and supportive people around me. The secret to survive is to (1) work hard, and also (2) assemble myself a group of warm people around, no matter they are family, friends, colleagues, advisers, or roomies, no matter they are far or near, no matter they are virtual or real. Communication is a way to survive, also to gain socially constructed knowledge.

I watched this awesome talk about vulnerability by Brene Brown(Brene Brown: The power of vulnerability | Video on TED.com). According to her research, the people who accept their own imperfection, and vulnerability, the people who are dependent, and believe that they need other people's support will open their heart and embrace the world around them. These people will get the most support from people around and will be the happiest. This is an excellent supporting material to the (2) above. I believe and feel the power of getting more contact with nice people around me. I am increasingly believe using the way of social media to do that. Using the technologies of building a virtual world to get chance to contact people in real.

Now the problem for me is how to balance (1) and (2), sometimes I need to talk with people, but also I need time to concentrate on my work by myself, also I am afraid that if I do (1) too often, people will leave me automatically leave me alone, and I couldn't get chance to do (2), and I would feel lonely and frustrated again. This is the thing I need time to learn how to manage.