From Austin to A&M: Don’t you know you’re not special?

Those who liked my Open Letter and Millennial Problems posts will really like this one from Courtney Stoker: From Austin to A&M: Don’t you know you aren’t special?

An excerpt:

I was told, proudly, that I was a per­fec­tion­ist, and no one even noticed that my per­fec­tion­ism was a gen­er­a­tional symp­tom of a pro­foundly dys­func­tional way of liv­ing. Most peo­ple I was friends with were “per­fec­tion­ists,” because we knew that work­ing hard didn’t guar­an­tee us any­thing. Per­fec­tion didn’t guar­an­tee us any­thing. We knew that at 17. So we obsessed, and we com­pared notes, and we deprived our­selves of sleep. We accrued a fig­u­ra­tive wall of tro­phies, not because we thought they were worth any­thing, or because we were proud of them. Because we needed a wall of tro­phies to get into col­lege, to get schol­ar­ship money. Per­fec­tion­ism, we were told, was a virtue. And it made us worn out, anx­ious, depressed, and ter­ri­fied to fail.

When I grad­u­ated from high school, my favorite teacher wrote in a card to me that she was impressed with how I did it all, that I was a super­woman. And when I read it, I lit­er­ally cried with relief, because I thought, I don’t have to do it any­more. I don’t have to sur­vive on 4–5 hours of sleep and con­stant exhaus­tion.  I don’t have to hear peo­ple crow, “I don’t know how you do it!” and bite back the bit­ter “I do it by not sleep­ing and hav­ing weekly panic attacks.”