The idea that you give yourself a global rating as a human and that your general worth and self-acceptance depends on the goodness of your performance and the degree that people approve of you.
Yeah, I do this.
I always have.
I remember when I was younger and I heard about an elder cousin who got straight A’s. I felt that I would never get straight A’s and I felt hopelessly inadequate compared to her. Worse, I felt that my parents would never be proud of me. It was all too much. I ran into another room to cry.
The irony is, I did get straight A’s during the fall semester of my senior year of college. It was, without doubt, the most difficult semester of my life. I wrote 15 papers that semester. And I am only counting superstar were at least 4 pages long. I was shocked and happy, but not all that happy. Why? Because that winter break, I had surgery on my knees. I spent two weeks in the hospital with physical therapy twice a day. I had to relearn how to bend my knees, a slow and very painful process.
In light of that, getting straight A’s seemed irrelevant.
i guess my point is, maybe the standards are not as important as we make them out to be. I wasn’t popular in high school, but for the most part, I haven’t had to see most of those people again, so did it really matter? I guess not.
