Show Notes
Patricia and Nicole chat about perfectionism and it probably isn’t the first time! Of course, Patricia also talks about books and offers her ruminations on André 3000’s recent album.
This episode is based on Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice Volume 1, Issue 7: 5 Stars
Mentioned on the show:
New Blue Sun, album by André 3000
Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less by Tiffany Dufu
Micro Activism: How You Can Make a Difference in the World Without a Bullhorn by Omkari L. Williams
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Sound editing by Jen Zink
Transcript
Patricia: Hey folks, welcome to Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice, the podcast for folks who would rather curl into the fetal position than lean in. I’m your host, Patricia Elzie-Tuttle.
Nicole: And I’m your co host, and Patricia’s wife, Nicole Elzie-Tuttle. We’re recording this show on November 18th, 2023
Patricia: What I wanted to mention up top here that we kind of slid into the end of last episode and we didn’t really talk about is that we have a Patreon and we would love you to support us there and show support for the show.
That is how we can keep this show going. Your pledges will help. Pay for editing, it will pay for all of the time and labor goes into this. It’ll pay for our hosting and things like that. Right now, the only level we have there is for Helpful Helpers at three dollars. It is just the satisfaction of showing us some financial support.
Hopefully in the future, if we keep this going, we will have other levels with some cool swag and maybe some Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice Nights, or I don’t know, some other, some other shows, uh, some paid content. So Patreon, it’ll be at patreon. com backslash eedapod. You can already find us there.
And we will, of course, mention it at the end of the show.
Nicole: What else is going on, Patricia?
Patricia: You know, the thing on my mind right now is this week André 3000 released a new album called New Blue Sun. So for folks who don’t know who André 3000 is, he’s a musician, an artist, I want to say he was a rapper. I think he’s still a rapper inside of him, but he’s not doing rap right now.
You probably know his song, Hey Ya, that was super popular quite a while ago. And in interviews, he was saying how some of his friends don’t even like his music, that when he played Hey Ya for them before he released it, they were like, “man, if you release this song, that is gonna kill your career.” So his latest album is titled New Blue Sun.
And people are saying it’s a flute album, like literally the instrument, the flute. There are flute elements to it, but I don’t think that accurately describes this album.
Nicole: No, I think, like, if Lizzo did a flute album, like, you could call that a flute album. This is not a flute album.
Patricia: No, it is really hard to put this album in a box, and it feels incredibly intentional in that way. You can tell at least today, when we looked at it on Spotify, people, you know, 16, 000 listens to the first song, and then it dropped to like 7, 000 listens to the second song. The music is instrumental, and it is very Afro futuristic, Sun Ra, very, like, am I inside the Black Tardis right now? I personally, I love it.
It’s freaking weird, and I think it’s amazing. He has I think it was track three on there, and all the song names have like incredibly long names and it’s so absurd and I love it. And the third song is titled, That Night in Hawaii When I Turned Into a Panther and Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control.
Isht was wild. And as soon as I heard this song, immediately, it was like, it falls squarely into the exotica genre, so think Martin Denny, think Tiki Bars, think Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, and I see, like, I hear what he’s doing, and I’m into it, and I very much understand that people who are maybe fans of his other work are not into it.
This is the album of a person who wanted to make people feel something, who wanted to make art that is hard to commercialize, and I am here for it. I am here for weird music. I’m here for Black people being weird. I’m a weird Black person. I love meeting and hearing and seeing other weird Black people do our things.
Um, I know there’s the word blerds for like Black nerds and that’s a whole thing, but I’m like, where are my other bleirdos? Where are the bleirdos? Like, where are the gonzo muppet ones of us?
Nicole: From what I’ve seen of André 3000, he definitely falls in the Gonzo Muppet realm.
Patricia: Yeah, I love it. I love it so much. And so this album, it haunts me.
I want to listen. I just want to listen to it over and over. And I don’t even know if it’s, I don’t know. I don’t know. It just, it just resonates.
Nicole: Yeah, I can totally tell as we’re just chillin out, listening to this not-a-flute album.
Patricia: Yeah. It’s awesome. So, that was New Blue Sun by André 3000 album is available, where albums are available.
So today.
Nicole: Today.
Patricia: Today, I want to talk about something that has become, it’s a phrase that has become pretty normal in our household. And so I wanted to back up a little bit and tell you a little bit about my history, a little bit about my upbringing. So my mother’s side of the family is Filipino, and I grew up in, on, with that side of the family.
So I grew up with my Asian side of the family, and when it came to academics for me and what was expected of me, it was very stereotypical to say that I had a very strict upbringing, especially when it came to academics. I was expected to get A’s or A pluses.
Anything less than that, I would get grounded. I would get the television taken away. I’d get the Nintendo taken away. And so the expectation of me was always absolutely the best. Number one in everything. Top of the class. And so this was just the air that I breathed, it was the water I swam in, it was just my entire upbringing was excellence, excellence, excellence, perfection, perfection, perfection.
And, Nicole, you and I had very different upbringings.
Nicole: We did, yeah. I did not have that level of expectation placed on me growing up. I think the best way to describe the expectation was that I needed to be better than average. But there was never an expectation of 4.0, class president, valedictorian, anything like that.
My parents were stoked that I was taking honors classes, if anything, and passing them. That was really the expectation. “Just don’t fail” was more what it was, but be better than average. And my academic career was one where I often, you know, started off a semester with A’s and B’s and dipped down to some C’s, maybe some D’s, I’d get in trouble. But by the end of the semester, I could typically pull them up and everybody was mostly happy again.
Patricia: You say that right now and my eye twitches, but it is also just so foreign to me to be allowed to do that. It’s even interesting that I use the word allowed in this context. And it’s as foreign to me as my classmates who would get money for good report cards, like A’s or things like that. That was never a thing in my household because that was just the expectation.
Nicole: We wouldn’t get money from our parents for good grades, but some of our grandparents would give us money for good grades.
Patricia: Mhm. Mhm. And for me, it also, it did extend some outside of academics. It was behavior. It was, you know, perfect behavior.
Perfect. I wore school uniforms, and so uniforms had to be cleaned and ironed, and I was the one doing my own laundry and ironing, and everything had to be crisp and neat, and it was, like I said, it was just the, the air I breathed. Likewise, I know this is also common for other folks in the BIPOC community, and even kind of extending it out, it relates to the idea of Black excellence and respectability politics, if we are perfect, if we give people no reason to treat us poorly.
then somehow we would be above racism or above hatred, and that is not true, but there are still a lot of people, even some of my elders, who very much buy into this idea of, well, you only deserve to be treated well if you are respectable.
Nicole: Yeah, that’s real different from the world I came from, because It’s almost like it’s an invert from what I grew up with, where it was just don’t give anyone a reason to treat you poorly, but that baseline level of decency and humanity was automatically afforded, as long as you didn’t give someone a reason to take it away, which is a real interesting inversion of what you were talking about.
Patricia: Yeah, that’s fascinating because I also know that, well, and then there’s the wider idea of some folks thinking that they don’t afford this kind of basic humanity because of the situation they’re in. And then there’s this idea that, oh, if someone is poor, that’s their fault, and therefore I don’t need to be human to them.
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: But I’m going off the rails here, but I think there’s this almost morality at play with perfection and excellence
Nicole: yeah
Patricia: and these ideas. But coming back to this idea also of excellence and perfectionism, one of my elders really likes to say if you’re going to be a bear, be a grizzly, right? If you’re going to do something, do it with your whole chest or be the biggest and baddest out there and while I get what they’re saying, and sometimes I’m like, “yes, I’m going to be the best at this thing,” it is not sustainable for everything to be the best all the time.
Nicole: Yeah, and I think that, again, is flipped on its head as I grew up because like I said, the expectation wasn’t that you were the best, you just had to be good enough. But this also ties into what you were just mentioning with the morality around this morality attached to how good you are at something, and also how that ties with wealth.
Because that really seemed to be the message I got a lot growing up was you don’t have to be the best, you just have to be good enough to continue upward mobility.
Patricia: Mm.
Nicole: And I don’t want to say don’t be poor, but don’t be like those people.
Patricia: Mm. Mmhmm.
Nicole: Which has this kind of undertone of poor
Patricia: right
Nicole: to it, right?
Like, don’t do anything to drag us, us being yourself and the family down. And really, of course, there’s, you know, this almost inherent racism tied to that. It’s not overt, it’s not expressed, but there is this, because of power difference and class difference in the way that different racial and ethnicity groups have been able to achieve upward mobility.
There’s this underlying of, you know, those people that you shouldn’t be like includes many non white peoples. And we should only afford respectability to those who have been able to achieve upward mobility.
Patricia: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for saying that. I think this also feels very common with my white friends that I grew up with in junior high, especially
Nicole: mmhmm
Patricia: because I didn’t grow up in a super affluent area.
And This definitely felt like the gist and this was definitely my grandparents too on my mother’s side and their kind of internalized white supremacy, right? And that they were still very much almost as an act of self preservation, trying to assimilate and trying to not be like the other families.
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: And you’re right, class is inextricably linked to race, and you can’t, you can’t separate those things, classism and racism. They are two sides of the same coin.
Nicole: Yeah, definitely. And that’s, I think that’s where a lot of people get mixed up, and we’re going down a different route here, but when they say, like, my family isn’t racist, sure, but are they a little classist? And does that have racism embedded in it?
Patricia: Well, if you ask people, they’re going to say no.
Nicole: Of course not. Of course. Of course people will say no, but when you really investigate the lessons you were taught, not overtly, but through what you were shown and the behaviors, that’s where you find these, I guess, kind of insidious teachings.
Patricia: Yeah. So, Looking at my perfectionism specifically, and I can link some of it to, of course, as I mentioned, my upbringing and also some of my particular flavor of neurodivergence, my obsessive compulsive disorder and needing things to be a certain way just for me to feel comfortable and for me to be less anxious.
But something that I have also learned by talking to my contemporaries, to my peers, to my friends, to other people my age who were really great students, they did a lot of extracurriculars, and they were also from like lower middle class, families is this idea of teachers didn’t have to worry about the kids who were doing well in school.
Doing well in school was a great way to mask if things were terrible at home. Because no one tries to look behind the curtain of the kids who are getting A’s, and they’re a speech team, and they’re a debate team, and they’re in the theater club, and things like that. So, if you just act like everything is great, and you do your homework, and you speak up in class, and you do all these great academic things, and you’re perfect in all of these ways, then it won’t give adults in your life who aren’t necessarily your family, maybe your coaches, maybe your theater directors, maybe your teachers, it won’t give them reason to dig any deeper.
And so, it’s almost perfectionism a bit as a trauma response. Some people I talked to, it was perfectionism as a way to even protect their abusers. And even protect themselves from getting in trouble, because, hey, if they let things let slip, then maybe adults in their life will get in trouble for whatever.
And as I talked to more people, especially my age and my 40s and a lot of my peers who have had similar experiences, it was almost shocking to me about how many people I know have had this experience. And I think the other thing about perfectionism, of course, is that it is exacerbated by the internet, by access to the internet.
And we could see this when it comes to just how people look and you should look a certain way, but also that your homes should be a certain way and that you should parent a certain way and that you should spouse a certain way and realizing that for me personally, if I show you any pictures of anything in my home, like a bookshelf or maybe my plants, I promise you’re only seeing a tiny bit of the area and you’re not seeing like the huge mess elsewhere.
And it is hard to keep that perspective in mind, that we’re only seeing a slice of things on the internet when everything we see is just perfection and so well curated.
Nicole: Well, and that’s part of a bigger discussion that’s been going on the last couple of years is around how much of what we see on the internet is driving a decline in mental health because you’re seeing these stylized and perfected lives that aren’t real.
It’s really that kind of curated magazine media culture to another level because you’re seeing… you’re seeing what seems to be people living these lives. It’s not just single pictures all the time, but a lot of these people have entire teams behind them crafting everything that’s being seen on these accounts of influencers and the like.
It’s an image of perfection that’s not attainable outside of having vast amounts of wealth and a whole team of people backing you to set it all up to look that way.
Patricia: Yeah, yeah, totally. I think back to when I finally learned that there are some people who just get luxury brand shopping bags, like Prada bags and Coach bags and Tiffany’s bags, like just the paper handled bags, and they take these photos and they fill them with empty boxes.
And you’re looking at me like this is madness, and it is.
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: And so you see all of these pictures of, oh, these people shopping, and they have all these bags, and they’re surrounded by all these bags. They’re just empty bags they got from these stores.
Nicole: That’s wild.
Patricia: Yeah. Yeah, and so I think that’s the one thing I keep in my mind when I look at all these things is that they’re just empty bags.
All this content, I’m like, it’s just empty bags. Except the one content, like, when I think about people making art.
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: And I am super soothed by watching cookie decorating videos. I love the royal icing, the cookie decorating videos, it’s so satisfying to me. And the thing is, is even if I see a sped up video, what I didn’t see was the months or years of practice of absolutely jacked up cookies that look terrible.
And that’s the thing too, when I’m looking at an artist, even if they have sped up their sketching, I’m not seeing their high school sketchbooks. I’m not seeing their years of art classes or years of just teaching themselves. I’m not seeing all that. I’m seeing the finished product.
Nicole: Yeah, and that’s where, for me, this idea of perfectionism gets kind of internalized and keeps me from doing some things.
As you were saying, like art, especially visual arts, I’ve never done visual arts to any particular extent, primarily because I wasn’t good at it from the start. And I remember growing up seeing friends in like elementary school drawing these amazing elaborate pictures and everything. And I would sit down and like need a ruler to draw a triangle and just give up.
But what I wasn’t seeing now, when I look back, what I wasn’t seeing was them spending all day after school with a sketchbook, just drawing and drawing and drawing and drawing. But I think this comes back to the different ways we were also raised in some way, because there is a thing that I wasn’t good at, and it was something that was done poorly if I tried, and that reflects negatively in some ways.
And since I wasn’t good at it, and it wasn’t something that would shine, then I shouldn’t be putting effort into it, necessarily. Does that make sense?
Patricia: It makes sense. It sounds similar, and you can definitely correct me if I’m wrong, but there are a number of people I know who also have a habit of not doing things they’re not immediately good at.
Nicole: Oh, I’m definitely one of those people that you know that do that.
Patricia: Yeah. We are so impatient with ourselves in allowing ourselves to be learners, and sometimes that’s because we were never allowed spaces to be learners.
Nicole: Right. Part of it though, is not being taught or not being allowed to find joy necessarily in that early learning, messy phase.
Patricia: Well, and sometimes I know with myself it’s just impatience.
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: It’s just impatience. I see where I want to be and I get impatient that I’m not there.
Nicole: I definitely feel that, and I think part of it comes from what you were talking about earlier with seeing the perfection of other people.
And so like you said, I see where I want to be. And so when I see what I’m doing to learn, I’m not happy with it. And I haven’t learned to be happy with that early messy stage because I so much want the end stage.
Patricia: Right, right. And I think sometimes I am intimidated by the amount of work it takes to get to that end stage.
Nicole: I don’t even know if I’m intimidated by it so much as just not excited by it in some ways. I need to be excited by what’s going on and, and enjoy that part. And if the end result isn’t what I want, I feel like I’m disappointing myself in some way. Yeah. Welcome to, uh, Nicole finds out things about herself while recording live.
Patricia: So, I am very good with many things at understanding the theory behind them, like, yes, I understand that perfection is not sustainable or even attainable, but I am garbage at putting things into practice, especially with myself, and I think perfectionism really kind of crumbled for me once the pandemic started.
Nicole: Oof.
Patricia: It came about especially when deciding what to eat. Whether it’s for lunch, whether it’s for dinner, somehow up until that point, I don’t know if I didn’t realize how terrible it was to decide what’s for dinner every night. I don’t know, I don’t know but something about the pandemic made it extra hard.
And there’s only the two of us. We don’t have any littles. We’re not taking care of any other people right now. And just deciding what was for dinner every night was just seemed like a monumental task sometimes.
Nicole: It really did. And we tried a lot of different ways to get around it with real meal planning, even a service, like a website thing that we could go in and pick out meals, and it would tell us what ingredients to buy at the store.
Patricia: Yeah, and yet it would still come to that point of, we would be too tired, and we would be too hungry to decide what is for dinner, and so I would look at you, and I would start throwing out ideas. And you would shoot every one of them down because nothing sounded good because we were too tired
Nicole: yeah
Patricia: and too hungry.
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: And finally, something for me clicked. And I was just like, not every meal needs to be five stars.
Nicole: Right.
Patricia: Not every meal needs to be five stars. Not everything we eat is going to be phenomenal Michelin starred food. And sometimes meals, especially when it gets really hot, we don’t have air conditioning.
Sometimes my meals are cereal and I am not putting down cereal at all. I love cereal. Cereal is great. Cereal is delicious. It can hit the spot and I have never sat in front of a bowl of cereal and said, “man, this is some five star cereal.”
Nicole: Is there a place we can get like Michelin star rated cereal?
Patricia: Is that your new business idea?
Oh my gosh. But I think just telling myself and telling each other that not everything has to be five stars is just my way of saying, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Nicole: And that phrase right there is something that I’ve also been working on, surprise, surprise, living with you, and having these discussions outside of a podcast.
Patricia: A story that Tiffany Dufu writes about in her book, Drop the Ball, where she was doing all the things, all of the emotional labor, domestic labor, uh, also working her job and doing all of these things and taking care of the children, but also that kind of invisible domestic labor that can happen, like, making sure the dry cleaning got done and picked up and things like holiday magic or tooth fairy magic.
People, someone in the house has to notice when a tooth is loose, if the tooth is under a pillow and things like that. And so in Drop the Ball, she talks about actually talking to her husband and handing off things because part of the problem was that she just had an absolute death grip on some things and not releasing some things to do.
And I think about when she was the one planning the dinners for the week. And she handed that to her husband and she was planning different meals every day or every couple of days. And what he did was he cooked a big portion, a big pot of something at the beginning of the week and portioned it out, and that’s what they ate during the week, and it is not what she had in mind, and she wasn’t specific about it, and he’s still technically planned dinner the whole week. So, you know, it’s important to recognize, like, if you want someone to help you or if you want someone to also take part in things, whether it’s a, especially domestic things, whether it’s a spouse, whether it’s a roommate, whether it’s whatever adult is living with you, if you have an adult living with you.
I think it’s also letting go of this idea of what is perfect for you and letting people do things their own way. And I think about that book a lot. It’s Drop the Ball by Tiffany Dufu. And it was, uh, especially that, that example of the dinners.
Nicole: Making something to last the whole week is one of our favorite ways to have dinner.
Patricia: Oh, absolutely. I couldn’t possibly with a full time job. I couldn’t possibly make a new dinner every night.
Nicole: No, and it’s great because it’s made and we don’t have to think about it.
Patricia: Yeah.
Nicole: Just heat it up.
Patricia: So we have this idea of not everything has to be five stars. So how do we kind of internalize this message? And it comes down to two things that, again, I’m going to talk about a lot on this show.
One, self compassion, and two, introspection.
Nicole: I don’t know her.
Patricia: So, self compassion is something that I’m constantly trying to work on. And the way that I Get to even recognizing if I am or am not being compassionate toward myself is I think about my compassion toward others. And so with this, I think in this situation, would I demand five stars from someone else?
Would I demand five stars from my wife, Nicole? Would I demand five stars from my coworker or whoever? I mean, if the answer is yes, then that might be something else for someone to unpack. But I think about, do I expect perfection from someone else? And if not, why is it okay to expect that from myself? And then, going towards the introspection, I ask, does it matter?
Does it matter if this thing is five stars? In the grand scheme of things, does lunch on a Tuesday, when we both work from home, matter if it’s five stars?
Nicole: Those are some five star dinosaur nuggets.
Patricia: Some five star tater tots.
Nicole: Oh, the best. This is one of those hard things, and this is where it comes down to that self compassion and introspection you were talking about.
This is, this is the crux of this kind of work, right? In dealing with yourself, and giving yourself that compassion, and also unlearning some of this perfectionism, right? You have to have the compassion to allow yourself to not be perfect, but you also need to unlearn those perfectionist beliefs that were instilled in you.
Because if you’re constantly going around expecting five star cereal, you’re just going to be disappointed. A lot. And that doesn’t sound like much fun.
Patricia: We are at the point of the show where I want to share a resource and I want to share a book today. It is a book that came out recently, within the last couple of months, it’s called Micro Activism, How You Can Make a Difference in the World Without a Bullhorn by Omkari L. Williams. This book, it’s a short one, and I think it’s one of those books that I am going to have to read annually.
I don’t know about you, but I think most people here listening are overwhelmed by the amount of injustice and awful that is happening in the world. And that there is just so much to do. There’s just so much to do. And sometimes I feel frozen because I don’t, I don’t know what to do first. And there’s just so much, and I am only one person.
This book talks about how, first of all, not everyone needs to build something new. Not everyone needs to be the Oprah of the protest. Not everyone needs to be the speaker. There need to be people who are passing out sunscreen. There need to be people who are passing out water bottles. There need to be people to make sure there are chairs near the stage if there’s a speech for people who need chairs. There are people who need to plan logistics.
It’s important to realize that. The fight needs everyone and every fight has multiple different things that people can do. And at the same time, we all can’t fight every fight. And so this book also talks about narrowing your scope, picking those one or two things that you’re really going to focus on.
And then doing a little something every day, something small, something sustainable, and trusting that if, for example, I am focused on, on trying not to get books banned, and I’m focused on transgender rights and safety, then I have to trust that other people are going to focus on climate change and other people are going to focus on immigrant rights.
And it’s hard. It’s hard because I want to do everything all the time. And this book was so helpful in recognizing that we each as individuals are a finite resource. And so we all need to focus and it tells us how, and it tells us also some ways to take care of ourselves and support each other. This was Micro Activism, How You Can Make a Difference in the World Without a Bullhorn by Omkari L. Williams.
Nicole: That sounds like an incredibly important message for these times, where I also want to support and help fix everything and I’m already exhausted.
Patricia: Yeah. And as I saw a video on Instagram the other day, I’m not exhausted from caring.
Nicole: No.
Patricia: I’m exhausted from the injustice.
Nicole: Yeah. If there was a lot less injustice, I think I would be a lot less exhausted.
Patricia: Yeah, absolutely.
Nicole: With that in mind, what is bringing you energy, Patricia? What is filling your cup right now?
Patricia: Well, I know I just talked about not wanting to decide what is for dinner most nights, but I am delighting lately in making some really elaborate meals. The other day I made a roasted butternut squash brown butter frizzled sage risotto that had caramelized maple butternut squash bits in the risotto.
It was beautiful. The recipe said quick and easy. I was in the kitchen for like three hours, but for me it was worth it. And I really liked being present, cooking, chopping, stirring, and not being on my phone, and just being with the food. How about you? What’s filling your cup?
Nicole: Eating that delicious food you keep making.
But also, I think, in eating it, taking the time, as you said, being off of your phone and just being present with the food. In the same way, being present while eating it and just trying to really center myself in the experience of eating well prepared food and trying to enjoy that experience and not just have it as something that I’m doing while scrolling the internet.
Patricia: Fair.
Well, that’s our show for today. We’d like to thank our awesome editor, Jen Zink. You can find her at loopdilou.com and we’ll definitely link that in our show notes.
Nicole: And you can find the full show notes and transcript at eedapod.com. That’s E E D A P O D dot com. There you can also find a link to our Patreon, our Bookshop link, the podcast email list, and a link to the ongoing Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice newsletter.
You can also find us on Instagram and Blue Sky at eedapod, and email us at eedapod@gmail.com.
Patricia: We are nothing if not consistent.
Nicole: We would appreciate it so much if you would subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts that allow ratings. It really goes far in helping other people find us.
Patricia: We would also appreciate anyone who can subscribe to us on Patreon. Support there is going to help us keep this show going. You can find us at patreon.com/eedapod. In the meantime, we hope you find ways to be kind to yourself, drink some water, have a snack, and we’ll be talking to you soon.
Nicole: How about those snacks?