Perfectionism: The Start

I was a normal girl in high school, who just wanted to fit in and make friends. I wanted to be “popular” and “cool” – the “Everybody wants to be her” kind of girl. Since I was so infatuated with having a social life, I was not a “straight A” student. School did not come easy for me. It took a lot of hard work to maintain a B average. However, sports did come easy for me. I ran cross country and played soccer and softball at the varsity level for all three sports. My mentality playing sports was, “You have to be the best!”

All of this striving resulted in an eating disorder that left me broken and lost, and the feeling that I was alone. I had lost the vision of whom I truly was because I wanted to be involved with everything my friends were doing. I wanted to look the part and do everything in my power to make them happy, all just to fit in for 4 years.

College: My Perfectionism Continued

After high school, I moved to Omaha to play soccer at UNO and to one day go to med school. At this point in my life, I was a freshman in college living in a new city with no friends and a clean slate. I could have been anything I wanted to be, but instead I chose to continue to strive to look and be the perfect girl. I started to get riskier with my eating disorder by loosing more weight, just so that I could look skinny, and I started to drink with my roommates to “fit in.” I found it difficult to go to school full-time, play soccer, and be the perfect version of what I thought everyone wanted me to be. Then one night, it all came crashing down.

The Rock

My RA and the captain of my soccer team invited me one night to an organization on campus called “The Rock.” That night, I felt out of my comfort zone. I walked into a room full of people I didn’t know, and they were genuinely friendly. It was such a different experience to have complete strangers come up and talk to me and actually care. Also on that night, the pastor talked about having a relationship with God, something I never knew was possible. He talked about how Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came down to earth, to die for all of our sins. He, who was sinless, became sin, so that we would have the free gift of life in heaven with him for eternity.

The Free Gift!

After leaving The Rock that night, I could not get that message out of my mind. Something was tugging on my heart. A week later, after trying to ignore my conscience, I finally opened the Bible for the first time in my life, to see if God was real. I opened the book and landed on this verse:  “Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ” (Galatians 1:10).­ On September 20th of 2009, I prayed to ask Jesus to come into my heart. I told him that I was a sinner, a perfectionist, and that I wanted to stop living to please this world. I just wanted to be whom he made me to be, and to help me take off all of the “masks” I had put on over the years.

My life has been forever changed.

I no longer have an eating disorder. I am currently in nursing school, studying to one day be a NICU nurse, and I am still involved in The Rock. To be honest, I still struggle with seeing myself as being made perfect in God’s image, and I still care what people think of me, but I am blessed to say, that I don’t live my life by what people think of me.

Do you want to know more?
If you want to know more about having a relationship with God through Jesus, check out:
Do You Know for Certain?