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  • Haley Haskin
    • Jan 28, 2019
    • 5 min read

Balancing Act


Balance is probably the hardest thing to find in life. Honestly. I could probably find buried treasure from a fictional treasure map easier than I could find balance. I could probably climb Mount Everest easier than I could balance … though if I got to a steep and narrow point, I can’t guarantee I won’t fall off, because like I was saying: no balance. Balancing has never been my forte, even in my dance career. I am flexible. I have nice movement quality. I am even pretty strong. But turns and pirouettes will forever be the bane of my dance career – for I have terrible balance.

I am an all or nothing, type-A kind of girl, a true extremist. The “all the!” meme describes my life well: 

If I’m given a task, I want to give it everything I’ve got. If I say yes to one thing, I have to say yes to everything, while I’m at it. If I say no to one thing, I’m saying no to everything. I commit. I unabashedly commit. Doing anything halfway puts me into the headspace that I may as well have not bothered at all. I’m never really comfortable with having a “screw it” attitude, even if sometimes I claim I’m not going to put effort into something. (I think this false claim usually just makes me feel better about all the hard work I’m definitely about to put into the thing I just said I wasn’t going to care about.) I just don’t see any reason to give things an okay effort if I could be giving everything I’ve got. To me, it just isn’t productive.

I know all that sounds honorable and noble. But you know what isn’t honorable and noble? How empty, run down, and spread thin my impossibly high standards consistently make me feel. It isn’t good that I’m so afraid of my anxiety and depression that I pile up accomplishments and to-do lists in front of my face, so I don’t have to acknowledge any fears or feelings of inadequacy that may surface in the peace and quiet. It isn’t good that my strife for perfection reduces my personality to such a dull hum that my friends and family are left to talk to a skeleton of a person, because my busy-body brain is always somewhere else. It isn’t good that I feel like I can’t afford to “waste” any time relaxing or doing something for myself because I’m so afraid of falling into indulgence and gluttony, and self-care is “for the weak.” It isn’t good that I’m so afraid of being a lazy, unaccomplished nobody, that I make my life miserable by overextending myself in a thousand different directions under the noble precept I’ve always been taught: “gaining experience.”

I may be the most judgmental person I know. Judgmental of myself mostly, but also of other people who don’t share my same enthusiasm for impossible work ethic. I tend to immediately write people off as lazy or apathetic when I hear they haven’t worked as hard on something as I have. It actually makes me angry at them sometimes. I guess I do it because I want to feel justified in the time and effort I’ve spent, and maybe it scares me how obsessive I can be over trying to be perfect. 

I know this is wrong, and I know I’m destined to reach a breaking point. I understand that it isn’t healthy. I wish I could take a break from the obligations I have tied myself to and the high standards I have inflicted upon myself.

But the scariest part is, what if in my extremist nature, I go the complete opposite direction and can never find a way to come back? What if fall in love with laziness, and junk food, and under-achievement? What if I become my biggest fears? A couch potato nobody, with no accomplishments, no goals, and not even a nice healthy figure that looks good in my clothes? What if I gain weight? What if I start hating fashion? What if I lose my flexibility? What if I lose my place in line? What if I abandon my journal and my planner? What if I never step foot in my gym shoes again? What if I start loving Netflix binging like a true 20-something year-old? What if I fall so in love with “taking a break” that I lose any and all will power to live a productive life ever again?

Everyone always tries to easily talk me out of this “ridiculous fear” in the name of what they call “balance.” But how on earth does an extremist find this seemingly intangible thing? It’s like this: I can never eat just one peanut M&M. So who is to say if I take a break, I won’t eat the whole bag of self-care? I’m close-minded to taking a break for the same reason I’m so hesitant to ever stray from my diet. I’m terrified of the rebound effect. Sometimes I just feel too polarized – like the north end of a magnet sliding along a bar that connects north and south. I am so unbudgingly attached to one end, so repelled by the other, that I could not possibly find a resting place in the middle. A comfortable nesting ground does not exist in my realm of ideology. Saying “a little bit of this, and a little bit of that” sounds like a really good idea when people give me advice. They even make it sound easy, in theory. But I feel like if I knew how to put this concept into practice, I would’ve stopped torturing myself with the harrowing characteristics of extremism long ago. I marvel at people who have achieved this feat, as balance seems more impossible, more remarkable, and more commendable to me than any of the achievements I’ve worked tirelessly toward in my life.

Usually I end each blog post with some sort of resolve – a discovery I’ve made, solving the world’s problems one at a time. But balance is something I still have not found a way to achieve. It is still a mystery to me – a glowing orb, suspended in a forcefield that I can’t break access to. As I’ve been grappling with the impossibility of balance for the last year, and for the entirety of this Sunday full of dread and self-doubt, it didn’t feel right to keep it all to myself. 

My creativity has been so run dry by my perfectionism, that my brain was uncapable of choreographing one more routine or formulating one more lesson plan today. But I did really feel like writing, and that is an urge I never like to deny. In all honesty, the bullet point “balance” has been sitting in my journal for almost a year now, waiting to be written about when I finally found an answer to it. I haven’t found that answer yet. But at least I’ve found transparency. I hope this blog did not leave anyone feeling negative, sad, or sorry for me. My goal truly isn’t any of those things. And I hope that if I did leave you feeling sad, you will reconsider this blog as a thoughtful journal entry and not a plea for attention and sympathy. I also hope if there are any extremists out there like me, that you feel understood. Sometimes it feels weird or petty or even privileged to complain about being an over-achiever. But just know that you aren’t the only one, and your strange fears instilled by perfectionism are shared.

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