Ramble on Fatigue and Challenging Perfectionism

Listen to me: depression fatigue is real. Treatment fatigue is real.

When I talk about fatigue, I don’t always mean the achey joints and muscles associated commonly with fatigue. Sometimes fatigue is the overwhelming exhaustion of life; that’s what I’m referring to. 

I’ve been battling depression for a large portion of my life, but recently I find myself experiencing more exhaustion than usual. I wake up tired. I drink my coffee tired. I make my breakfast tired. And I don’t want to do any of it. But the problem, aside from having depression, is that I’m a perfectionist, and as a perfectionist, I can’t make myself take a break until I’m good enough. Spoiler alert: nothing’s ever good enough. So I keep getting up, doing my things, going to classes, until someday I’ll feel like my life is worth living, but unless I challenge my perfectionism that day will never come. 

Challenging perfectionism is among the most difficult parts of recovery for me, because the “not good enough” in my head doesn’t feel like a disordered thought. I can challenge the you can’t eat that, I can challenge you’re fat and you’ve gained four million pounds overnight. And don’t get me wrong, those things feel like facts, too, but there’s something about you’re lazy and worthless and will never amount to anything because you’re not perfect that is harder to fact-check. 

It’s also more tiring to fight. It’s so much easier just to agree, because these things seem like absolute, unquestionable truths:

You’re hopeless. Yep.

You have nothing to offer. I’ve never met evidence to the contrary.

 Useless piece of garbage, waste of space. Obviously.

The worst part? I like mornings. I like coffee. I like breakfast food, as awful as that feels to my eating disorder to say. And I really, really like school. But everything leaves me so tired I can break down crying at any second. I think that’s why challenging those perfectionistic thoughts might be so much more difficult: they take more energy to disassemble, and I have so little energy to begin with.

There’s hope for this. I know there is, I’ve seen it at work in my friends and mentors. I’m still working on finding it. But here are some other things I know:

• Others say I’m good at things, and there’s no way everyone else can be wrong at the same time.
• What I was doing before didn’t make me any more perfect.
• You don’t have to be perfect to be worth it.
• Love is real.
• Sometimes people are worth hanging on for.

That’s what I’ve got for you. It’s not much, but it’s something, and it’s what’s keeping me going through the fatigue.

One final thought to combat the Perfectionism Gremlins: I have this Whitman quote plastered in my journal. My hope is that someday I might believe it.

I exist as I am, and that is enough.