The work of breathing: Pushing against perfectionism

By Ching-In Chen

When I hurt, I work. When I feel undermined or disrespected, I channel those feelings into more work, as if producing more could earn others’ respect. I place an impossible expectation on myself — to be a perfect teacher (making no mistakes!), perfect writer (no typos or underthought phrases!) and perfect community member (missing no community meetings or events!). When I first read Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun’s framework for the characteristics of white supremacy culture from Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, I felt a click of recognition — that I had been socialized and was fitting myself into a model of work and perfectionism that was upholding everything I did not want to support, a culture of unsustainable inequity.

I can’t pinpoint a specific time when I learned that my value was tied to the work I produced. But I believe it’s something I learned from observing my mother, who had a job as a physical therapist for many years and then would come home and do the cooking and cleaning labor of the household. I don’t have many memories growing up of my mother focusing on enjoying things which would give her pleasure or joy. Instead, I observed her choosing to do for others at her own expense until both my brother and I were adults, where she made an abrupt change in focus by joining the falun gong. Whatever her reasons, she reclaimed her time, focusing on what was meaningful to her. Looking back, I recognize that I did not take to this change well, having been used to being privileged and prioritized in the way she parsed out her time.

After the recent Atlanta shootings of six Asian women and two others, I observed this pattern of pushing myself to do more work. Though I already was overextended in my regular work life, I stepped up to put more time and energy into helping to organize a vigil for the community, joining the team to check and respond to social media messages and media requests, donations and other organizing tasks. Though I am glad to have had a way to channel my grief and rage in a productive way, I also realize this is what my body defaults to, what I know how to do to feel, to move forward without falling apart in what might be an inhospitable place for my grief and rage.

Looking back at myself as a young child, I was ostracized for being different – for being Asian American and the child of immigrants in a school dominated by white peers who made fun of my name, my clothing and my appearance. I was never right and I often felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. I developed a defense mechanism – to never make a mistake in front of others, to try not to let others see how their actions impacted me. This combination of perfectionism and overwork has proven to have been the hardest patterns for me to understand as a working adult, especially in a field shaped to reward competition and production.

As a new Assistant Professor in my first institution, I struggled with trying to juggle what my institution called the three-legged stool of research, teaching and service. When I thought of the three-legged stool, I only thought of imbalance and falling over in my effort to impossibly balance everything and give attention to all these competing areas.

For many years, working in community non-profits, I prided myself in how hard I worked – the accumulation of meetings and events organized, the number of hours I had clocked in. When I switched from working in non-profits to academia, I noticed that many of these same habits, specifically my pride in overworking and my own criticism of myself, transferred over to academia.

The semester that I taught during Hurricane Harvey – when all my plans were disrupted repeatedly – was a disaster. I was originally teaching three online classes, which effectively became six classes as the university worked to accommodate students by offering them an option to start the classes midway through as a compressed class. I could not hold everything I was being asked to hold. The only way forward seemed to be to force myself – by whatever trick I could – to incorporate breathing and stretching room into my schedule. I started having trouble sleeping and felt like no matter how hard I worked, I could never catch up, but I also felt like I couldn’t let anything drop. I judged myself harshly for not being able to do what I perceived as the necessary work. One night, driving late at night on my one hour and a half commute, my partner and I witnessed an automobile crashing into another car in front of it on the most dangerous highway in the United States. I felt a sense of dread, that it was only a matter of time until I ended up in my own disaster on the road. A few months later, the prophecy came true — I drove slowly into the back of a truck at a red light, making my car inoperable.

Over time, I realized that I could not sustain the pace of what I was doing for work. I needed to add more space into my life, what I thought of as including moments to breathe. Reflecting on what motivated me in the past, I realized that I needed to find a community of others who were doing something similar because if left on my own, I had a greater tendency to prioritize something else that I owe someone.

I decided to join a sangha at a local temple to do breathing meditation once a week. This helped me in the moment, but it felt very challenging to apply to my work life. It felt like as soon as I left the temple, I would revert back to my old working habits.

I wish I could tell you that I solved my problem with perfectionism and overwork, that I am a perfectly balanced being who has found meditative peace. The truth is that this is an ongoing practice that I struggle with daily. Meditation in community helps me at least to remind myself to check in with myself and to notice what choices I am making. This has been a practice which has been necessary during the pandemic when all my regular ways of working have been disrupted. It has pushed me to re-visit my own relationship to work and better understand my motivations for making choices about how to spend my time and how I do or do not value my body, energy and time. It has been and continues to be a journey of forgiveness and acceptance – of the ways that I have ignored or punished my body and the reminder to pay attention to what my body is telling me. A daily practice to clearly and thoughtfully make choices about where I choose to pause and where I choose to gift my labor.

Photo by Marco Silva on Unsplash