Do I Get Points for Making Peace with my Inner Achiever?

I'm nearing the threshold of breaking my "blog once a week" New Year's resolution. So here I am, doing what I do best--following the rules! Can you see my eyes rolling back in my head? This is the exact internal struggle I've been having for the past year (slash my entire life): I'm a lover and follower of rules and structure (which is GREAT for accomplishing things, following pre-determined paths to completion, paying bills on time), but somewhere along the line my perfectionism led me to seek external rewards instead of following my own intuition. I started hating the "over-achiever" part of myself and tried to make it smaller in favor of living a freer, more intuitive, whimsical life! Yay creativity! Boo perfectionism!

But the truth is, there is a huge part of me that loves structure and gold stars, that gets a rush from crossing things off of an overly ambitious to-do list, that can't imagine a feeling greater than reading Mr. Bernstein's glowing comments on the essay I wrote about Flannery O'Conner's Wise Blood. (I was also named the winner of his "Flannery O'Conner contest" and received a complete anthology of her short stories as a prize! I never read more than one of them though because there was no external reward dangling in front of my face. This is also why I quit reading Harry Potter after the first four books--no Accelerated Reader points after middle school. Turns out all that "pleasure reading" I was doing was actually "pleasure point-getting.")

I started to see this motivated, structure-loving achiever part of myself as "bad," but in reality she was just over-worked. I blamed her for things like my compulsive behavior around food, but the real question is why was she in charge of my food in the first place?! I was very disciplined about counting calories, compulsively working out, and never settling for whatever weight-loss goal I'd set for myself. "Well I guess being a perfectionist made you develop an eating disorder!" (FALSE. Being a perfectionist make you good at your eating disorder.) My achiever brain was in charge of too many things--my food, my free time, my relationships, my creative play. She started sounding like a drill sergeant--"DO THIS BLOG POST YOU LAZY, LAZY LADY!!"

Thankfully I didn't hear that today because I've given my "achiever" voice a long, generous break. She's been on sabbatical--eating, praying, and loving with Elizabeth Gilbert & friends. "You go ahead and take a break, achiever-Katie! It must have been hard running the show for so long. Take a load off, far, far away! Nope, farther than that. I can still see you. Keep going! Okay now stay there and wait for me to come find you." My plan was to abandon her like one might do with an annoying child in a game of hide-and-go-seek (or more accurately, "hide").

My life coach (her name is Rebekah and she's wonderful) recently brought to my attention that I'm denying a huge part of myself by silencing the go-getter inside of me for fear she's going to take over all the fun parts of my life and make them not fun anymore. But the truth is I'm not just one thing. I'm the captain of the Katie ship and I have a whole bunch of crew members who each do different jobs--there's Enthusiastic Performer Katie, Good-Listener Katie, Silly Playtime Katie, Hard-Working Achiever Katie, the new "Relaxed and Chill Katie" I'm working on developing right now, and probably more Katies I'm not even aware of yet! I used to think it was disingenuous or inauthentic to act one way sometimes and another way other times, but in reality it's inauthentic to deny entire parts of who I am. (THANK YOU REBEKAH YOU ARE WORTH EVERY PENNY I PAY YOU.)

It's not only important to make peace with the glasses-wearing, over-achiever, Accelerated Reader point-loving part of myself, but also invite her to come hang out with me again. "Heyyy Hard-Working Achiever Katie! I'm sorry I left you hiding behind that bush for so long. You don't have anything to apologize for--you were just being you, doing your job! I put you in charge of too many things. From now on I promise to only give you work that feels worthwhile and important--you don't have to count my calories anymore, yay! Thank you for showing up today. I will give you the gold star you love so much. And when we're done with this blog post you can take a break and I'm going to invite Silly Playtime Katie over to have brunch with a friend." And it looks like that's right now!