When it comes to good advice, Jessica Lanyadoo has it in spades. The Mission’s resident psychic/astrologer/badass gets booked months in advance by San Franciscans seeking help with everything from figuring out their love lives to communicating with their pets. So we asked Jessica if she’d come on board to do a weekly advice column for The Bold Italic. If you have a burning question for Truth Talk with Jessica Lanyadoo, email her at truthtalkwithjessica@gmail.com, and check back on Wednesdays to see if she has an answer for you.
Hi Jessica,
I have a tendency to be a perfectionist. I've been working on this a lot lately because I know it's not healthy or getting me to a happy place. One of the things I am continuously struggling with in letting this perfectionism go is noticing how much I compare myself to everyone around me. I have this fear of being left out or feeling like my friends are better friends with each other than with me. Or they are in healthier relationships or their bodies are fitter or they make more money etc. I don't know if some of this is even true! It leads me to this jealous nasty place I don't want to be in. Do you have any suggestions for breaking the jealous, comparison, always needing to be perfect cycle?
Thanks,
Perfectionist
This is an excellent question! So many of us struggle with believing that others are happier, wealthier, cuter, or just better than us. And it’s probably true; there’s always someone, somewhere that’s finer than you, no matter how awesome you are, just like there’s always someone out there that’s worse off than you, no matter how badly things suck. But, Perfectionist, there’s no limit to how many people get to thrive! If somebody else is doing excellently, that doesn’t take anything from you, or reflect anything about you. This drive to compare yourself is really a gnarly symptom of your belief that there’s something wrong with your life or missing within. In life you will totally lose out on things; people will have more than you, do more than you, have fun without you, and maybe even wipe their asses with money that you can’t even conceive of. Life is hard, and wanting things makes it harder, but if you don’t want things you’ll be stuck in a stagnant rut. The trick is to have longing, but not so much that it hurts you. All you need to do is create the life you want to live, and know that the shit that other people have going on has nothing to do with you. Your jealousies are about you, not the people or things that you’re focusing on. You may be obsessed with your friends who take marvelous vacations when you’re in a work crunch, and then get jealous of people who are getting accolades at work when you’re out playing. Let your feelings instruct you about where you’re out of balance, and don’t fall down the rabbit hole of taking them literally.
What you feed grows, Perfectionist, and the trouble with striving to be perfect is that you’re only able to assess your perfection by looking for what’s not right. Ugh. It sets you up to feel awful, even when you have every reason to rejoice. So try to accept this hippie-ish fact: where you’re at is perfect. Every shitty feeling, mediocre experience, and even your failures, are exactly as they need to be so that you can be who you are. The most powerful influencers of change in this world struggle, falter, and fail, because no successful person is without failure. None. The thing that will define you is how you handle your crap, not the absence of it. Practice reveling in the achievements of others (whether they’re imagined or real doesn’t matter), and try to imagine their fortune being like a river that can flow towards you if you let it – ‘cause it can. The more open you are to thriving, the more likely you are to do just that, just like the more you focus on what you don’t have, the greater those deficits become.
The bottom line is that you’ve gotta accept who and what you are. There’s no magic to this, and no real shortcuts. In those moments that you’re plagued with bad vibes and you can’t accept yourself, have compassion for that. Ambition without gratitude is like having a goddamn golden goblet but nothing to drink.
XO
Go to www.lovelanyadoo.com to read Jessica’s free weekly astrology column or to schedule a reading.