Breaking Free from Perfectionism - by Deb Liu

How Learning to Fail Helped Me Find Peace

I am a recovering perfectionist. There, I said it. I was the one who nitpicked font colors in PowerPoint and meticulously removed double spaces in emails. I would reread everything ten times to make sure it was right, then kick myself when I later found a mistake. Growing up, I tried to be perfect for my parents. They struggled so much coming to America that I had a hard time with the thought of letting them down. We lived in South Carolina, where less than 1% of the population was Asian American at the time. My parents constantly reminded me that because few had ever met people like us,…

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