hi, i’m michaela
For most of my life, I’ve been a perfectionist — hyper-focused on being the best daughter, student, sibling, athlete, friend, and partner I can be. For a long time, I believed that if something was not perfect — if I was not perfect — then there was simply more work to be done.
I won’t lie to you: growing up, I felt really proud of this mindset. I thought having an impossibly high standard for myself made me safer in some way, but at the same time, I logically knew that no amount of striving would ever make me perfect.
This meant that I lived in a constant state of feeling inadequate: I set the bar too high, and I spent my life staring up at it. And truth be told, that ‘perfectionism’ was just my armor — the thing I used as a mask to avoid saying, doing, or feeling the things that were true for me. I was never superior, I was just really, really tired.
There came a point where I realized that my perfectionism had brought me two things and two things only: intense anxiety and a crippling fear of disappointing others, both of which prevented me from fully participating in the human experience — from fully living.
Right when I thought I had started to figure out how to heal, my big sister died. The most confident, vibrant, fully human person I’ve ever known — my model for how to tap into a recklessly honest and beautiful existence — was taken from me without warning, and when that happened, it felt like nothing mattered. Who cares if you’re not fully living or experiencing human connection? Even if you figure it out, your people are still ripped from the world without their consent. It doesn’t matter, right?
Wrong. A year out from Alex’s death, I know now that our ability to create a true and beautiful life for ourselves is the only thing that matters. Life is hard, but we’re living it together, and the faster we can shed our armor — be it perfectionism, fear, insecurity, anger, resentment, pride, greed, or anything else that prevents us from fully showing ourselves to the world and each other — the faster we’re going to start living the lives we were meant to live.
Alex’s death could have shut me off from the world and turned me to stone. It almost did. But now I know how important it is to walk through the world with your heart ripped wide open for everyone to see. Letting it all in — the good, the bad, everything in between — means you’re still here. It means you’re fully living.
We only get one shot at this thing. One shot, and then it’s gone forever. Soak it in, and be kind to the people walking beside you. We’re all on the same team. We’re all on the same journey. We’re all just walking each other home.
deadsiblingsociety.org 