I am frustrated and disappointed with my life.

I want to apologize in advance if I am posting this in the wrong place, and because this post is going to be long and disorganized.


I struggle to have energy to do ANYTHING, and I hate it. There is a constant battle raging within me, that makes it hard to do even basic tasks.
I find it hard to be organized and motivated to work long-term at something. Every time I begin something, soon enough I begin to have thoughts that, "This work will amount to nothing. You'll gain nothing and never get better. It doesn't matter. You will never succeed at your goal."

I have no joy. When I do things, I do not feel genuinely happy, ever. For me, the only thing I care about is if I do it perfectly. If I write a book, I want it to be the perfect book with perfect writing. If I play guitar, I want to be one of the best.
The problem is when I try my hardest at something and fail at meeting my own standards, I freak out. I go on an emotional downward spiral.

I can't do anything, because you have to start out as a beginner with no skill (everyone does) and I do not see the value in creating "mediocre" art. I am a loser because I have no accomplishments due to this thinking.

This is ruining my life. I think that I want to be so great, so perfect, but I am not even close.

I have this idea in my head that I want to be an engineer and create these amazing things. Flying cars that don't run on gasoline. Teleportation devices. Hyper speed space crafts. But that is just a fantasy, or near delusion.

I'm going to be 20 by the time I START college, which is behind my peer group. I am terrible at math and have no talent at it. I scored poorly on a standardized math test. I am not a genius, so I am not capable of being what I am setting out to be. I am setting myself up for failure by LYING to myself about my own abilities, and by hating doing everything.

I need some advice on how to think correctly and where I should go in life. Everything about how I think is messed up.

This is EXACTLY why I went to therapy.

I was born from a father that didn't want me – he wanted to get rid of the pregnancy – and mother who resented me for essentially ruining her life; she was very young, decided to have me and it was not a good decision. I don't blame her at all for feeling this way. I do blame my father though – he accidentally remembered, once my mom got pregnant, that he already had a family elsewhere.

As a result I always felt I had to be perfect at everything. But it never felt good enough. And sometimes I got to be perfect. I'd bring home perfect As all the time and my mom (I never actually met my father) would be like "yeah that's nice". I never felt recognition for my achievements. My brother's average scores would be Ds, so if he brought a B it was a reason to celebrate how well he's done.

I went on to grow up with the same attitude. I remember going to the gym and doing lots of cardio to lose weight. I'd aim at 580 calories on the elliptical. If I "only" got to 578 I felt like a complete loser and a waste of time and space; I failed. Every time I worked on something and ended up making a mistake of some sort, it somehow covered 999 successes I had before. On my blog – I was rather popular as a writer, still am – a single negative comment could outweigh 999 positive ones. I wouldn't be able to sleep, obsessing about my failure to be perfect. And, cue in your thoughts: why bother? I will never be good enough. And then I would become good at it, but not very good. I'd become very good, but not great. And at some point I would hit a wall because you can't really be perfect at everything, and either suffer a nervous breakdown, or stop the activity altogether because what's the point?

(By the way, you apologising for posting this here is a symptom of this too.)

One of the things I tried was playing guitar. Of course, I immediately became to become at least as good as Mike Oldfield. After four weeks of practising – I discovered it's not easy to learn to play – I gave up. I could play one The Smiths song, but not the remaining... 100 or so. That wasn't enough after four weeks.

The fact you realise that this happening is a very important first step. I didn't realise for years and years. In fact when I went to therapy it wasn't for this issue, it was just that I had a feeling something was off with my thinking patterns. I didn't know what. But I knew they were incorrect. My therapist told me much later that the most shocking thing I told him was that I went to the gym six times a week and aimed to burn 10 more calories every cardio workout. Then within five minutes I said I was constantly tired and didn't know why. He suggested it might be the gym. "Oh no," I responded, "gym relaxes me". I seriously failed to see the correlation. The only thing I could think of was that I only managed to burn 568 calories, that was not 570, so I was a failure.

Big hugs if wanted. A good therapist can really help you a LOT with this. For me, perfectionism never really went away, but my life is much nicer now – I accepted I will never be world class everything at once. I focus on one or two things, try to do them as well as possible, revise them for a while, then just put them out (I'm a musician and writer) and move on to the next one. They're not perfect. Tough. Next one will be better.