Article 03 · Resources
The mask of perfection: the weight of living for others’ applause
Do you feel you always have to be the best, the most helpful or the one who never makes mistakes in order to be accepted? Learn why we build an “Ideal Self” that ends up being our own prison, and how to start taking off the mask to live with more freedom.
From childhood, we learn that access to pleasure and affection is not free: it is mediated by merit. “If you behave, I’ll buy you ice cream”. This logic gets so deep inside us that we develop what we call an Ideal Self: an image of perfection that we try to reach so that others love and validate us.
Every human act has a double intention: on one hand, we seek to satisfy a desire (to eat, to play, to love), but on the other, we seek recognition. The problem is when recognition becomes the owner of our life. It is what happens to the person who needs the house to be impeccable to receive guests, not for pleasure, but out of fear that they will think it is a mess. Or the professional who never allows themselves a mistake because they feel the mask will fall and everyone will discover they are a “fraud”.
This ideal works like a prosthesis: it helps us move in society, but at a very high cost. The further we move from our spontaneity to meet what is “expected of us”, the emptier we feel. We live running after a carrot we never reach, because the Ideal, by definition, is always one step beyond our reality.
Practical section
Letting go of the carrot
Growing up is learning to take less into account other people’s opinion and gaze, in order to reconnect with one’s own desire.
Identify your “narcissistic supports”
What do you base your worth on today? On your car, your partner, your job title? Realize that if those supports fail, you are still the same person. Start looking for your validation in an internal criterion, not in outside applause.
Allow yourself the “permitted flaw”
Choose something you are not perfect at and show it. It can be admitting you don’t know something in a conversation or leaving a task unfinished one day. Experiencing that you are not expelled from the world for being imperfect is the greatest liberation.
Tell “wanting” from “needing”
When you are about to do something for someone, ask yourself: “Am I doing it because I want to or because I need them to see me as a good person?” If it is out of need, you are feeding your inner tyrant. Try, once in a while, to say “no” to someone else’s demand in order to say “yes” to yourself.
If any of this resonates with you, we can think it through together.
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