My heart was beating so hard that I wondered if the entire middle school audience could hear it.
I wasn’t an athletic kid. I wasn’t the most popular or the most musical. There was only one thing I was naturally and effortlessly good at: spelling.
And this, the first stage of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, was my last chance to prove it. Eighth grade is the highest grade that can compete. I hadn’t won in sixth or seventh grades, but that was okay. Eighth graders always won.
My friends felt sure that I would win this year. My teachers were smiling at me encouragingly. I was kind of a shoo-in, actually.
Because the expectations of myself, my friends, and my teachers maybe weren’t quite enough, my mom, who was the anesthetist at a small hospital where they needed her every weekday, had taken time off work to come and see me win the spelling bee.
I felt a certain sweaty desperation in that acute way that only a 13-year-old can.
And just as expected, other kids slowly got buzzed off the stage, one after another. Until it was just me and another kid, a terribly awkward seventh-grade boy I’d never even noticed before.
And he won. I blew it, and this little pimply kid won.
I hadn’t known how horrible it was possible to feel about yourself until that moment onstage, walking back to my folding chair. I had failed. I had failed at the one thing everyone knew I was really good at. And I had done it in front of the whole school.
I wanted to go to the bathroom to cry alone in one of the scratched-up light green stalls that smelled of old cigarette smoke, but there was something I had to do first: face my mom. I knew I had disappointed her. She had taken time off work for no reason at all.
She found me backstage. She gave me a big hug. I’ll never forget her words:
“You came in second against all those kids! You had to spell so many words, especially against that one boy. You must have been so nervous, but you were amazing up there!”
I stared at her, stunned. She seemed completely earnest. Did she not see that I had failed? Did she not expect perfection? Was she actually proud of me for coming in second?
So I was never a perfectionist again… just kidding! I was. For a really long time. I would go on to spend hundreds of sleepless nights, tortured by term papers, exams, basketball games, dates, and job interviews, trying to ensure I was perfect.
But it mattered that my mom saw what I could not. I remembered. I stored it away in my heart and my body.
And eventually, I learned this lesson:
You can suffer and be terribly disappointed in yourself and make sure you’re never ever enough. Or you can see yourself through the eyes of such warm shining love that it burns away your fears and self-hatred.
Your choice.
You always have a choice in how you see yourself.
If you’d like support in learning how, contact Tara Greenway → Get Unstuck