Perfection

There was an article in this month's Teen Vogue (yes, I read it, don't judge me :D) about what perfect girls. I realized that my friends and I fit into that category, even though we are not all girls. The four of us are top of our grade, we have never received Bs on our report carts, we are involved in too many extracurricular activities, and we are known as the nerds of the school. People pretend to like us because we are nice to all of us, but I know that they don't actually because every single teacher loves us. We are the kind of students who when given a simple homework assignment will create amazing artwork, we are the students who set the curve. 

Other people expect us to do well, and we usually do. But when we don't do well we get made fun of, and you can see that people are happy because we have "failed". An example of this was when I was working on a problem in my AP Chemistry class. I got the problem wrong and a kid corrected me, when he realized that he was right and I was right he started being all "OMG you were wrong, I can't believe I just got something right and you didn't." I was actually really upset that people take so much pleasure in my failure. Another example was in my Pre-Calc class. We have the toughest teacher for that class and I was the only one that got a 100 and 120 on the first two quizzes and then got a 110 on the first test. I had never gotten a question wrong in that class, so the other day he asked me a question and I did get it wrong. Everyone in my class proceeded to stare at me because this was the first time in his class that I had gotten a question wrong. 

I also realized that while I struggle to be perfect at school I don't do it for myself or for my parents, I do it for other people. I love helping people, and I guess I love the feeling of being smarter than people. Being perfect is not always easy, I've sacrificed many things to gain that title, my friends and I classify as the people who have no lives, and we put food and sleep second in our priorities, after school. 

Because people expect me to do well on everything I also began to expect the same thing from myself. The other day I had a presentation for English, which I had worked on really hard. I am artistically challenged and I was able to draw a person that was as tall as me and it actually looked well. I got a 90 on that presentation and when I saw my grade I started crying, because I saw that as a failure. I now have a 90 in the class, I don't think I've ever been this close to getting a B in English and it makes me really upset. I know a B isn't a bad grade, but I see it as a failure.