the leopard who learns to love her spots
I recall a time in my 20s when I was probably one mixed drink past my capacity for excellent decision making. There, on a sweltering Denver summer night, idly blowing cigarette smoke into the night air, I scraped the bottom of the barrel of my own mental and physical well being. I was working too much, keeping hours and company that I cannot fathom anymore, and waiting for my life to pull itself together and make sense.
There is no hyperbole intended here. I legitimately recall thinking to myself that I was a mess because I was not 30 yet. People in their 30s seemed to have a better sense of themselves. People who were in their 40s? They had transcended being put together and, in my eyes, now moved through life without the dragons that had reared their heads in their early lives.
I assumed that with age would come the shedding of all these layers of mess that I had steadily accumulated in the last 20 years of living. Many of the patterns that created chaos in my relationships, and life, were unconscious to me. But I knew, in all that 20-year-old brilliance of mine, that by the time I got to 30, I wouldn’t feel so insecure and angry anymore.
This week, I celebrated my 38th birthday, and as I was lying in bed at the end of the day, I marveled at how much my life has changed since then. I could also hold the irony that at nearly 40, my less desirable parts will always be a part of me.
The idea that somehow age should allow us to stop struggling with things like insecurity, vulnerability, perfectionism, control, anger, grief, (you name it!) is pervasive. I work with women between the ages of 20 and 60 and at least once a week someone tells me something to the effect of, “It is so stupid I am still struggling with this (insert common human problem here) at my age. Why can’t I just get over it?”
I am here to share some disheartening and also liberating news with you.
You are going to go to the grave with those qualities about yourself that you so love to hate. But! You do not have to spend your life deadlocked with them in what I like to call the psychological alligator death spiral.
For example, a common one for those in their 30s and 40s is becoming exhausted by the perfectionism that drove them through their school years and young adulthood. Perfectionism starts to lose its luster the older you get, when you realize that it’s damn near impossible to be perfect at your job, your marriage, friendships, decorating your home, cleaning, cooking, mothering, or entertaining. There are simply too many balls to juggle and something is going to get dropped. This is typically something that the perfectionist mentally fights against until it runs out of steam and often ends up in therapy to figure out a new way of existing in the world.
But the perfectionist is never going to wake up and not be a perfectionist. A leopard does not change its spots—it just learns how to survive with the ones it has. And so, too, can we learn to integrate (not fix) the parts of ourselves that once served us, but we have outgrown.
I want to say this for the doubters in the back row—you are not a problem to be fixed. You are a human, with incredibly brilliant personality traits that probably helped you immensely in your early life. We are wired for survival, so perfectionism, like many things, is just a way of trying to survive in a complex world. No therapist will rid you of those foundational traits, and honestly, I would never want to. But therapy is a way to take the perfectionism (or any other trait) out of the proverbial driver’s seat of your life, and kindly scoot it over to the passenger side, so that the you who is evolving beyond it can drive now.
It may come as a surprise, too, that we do not have this changing of the guards by berating ourselves or shaming ourselves for being a 38 year old who still gets insecure at work, or a 44 year old who is such a peacemaker that we often cannot find our voice, or a 53 year old that still loses their patience with our kids and partner. We create change in our lives when we learn to love even the most messy, sticky, complicated parts of ourselves.
One of my most favorite parts of my job is getting to love those parts of my clients, and in doing so, showing them how to love the parts themselves. Truly, what a divine honor it is to have compassion for something that a client cannot stand about themselves. The irony is, perhaps, that in doing this, we therapists also learn to do the same with ourselves. This, in the great circle of healing, also becomes more compassion for others. We cannot offer others what we do not offer ourselves.
At nearly 40 I am not fixed. I am still me, even the parts that are hard for me to love. I no longer see a destination of age or a mile marker of time when I will be all better. There are times when even I fall into old patterns that I have worked hard to scoot over and ride shotgun while I drive. But being human is being human. Maybe this is what I actually admired in people older than me who seemed to have it all put together. What I assumed was them overcoming being human, was actually just them learning to love and accept the Self that they have to circle the sun with. With a deep exhale, that is a truth that I can hold, because acceptance and love is far more attainable than perfection.
Per aspera, ad astra.
Julie