“Now that you don’t have to be perfect,
you can be good”.
(John Steinbeck, East of Eden)
Adolescents struggle often with perfectionism, shaped by pressures coming from many directions all at once: Society. Family. And worse: pressures coming from the self, which in the teen years is still fragile. The perfectionist has standards with a quality of ‘not ever quite there’. The whole point of these self-inflicted standards is that they’re ‘difficult, if not impossible, to meet’.