As I sit down to write this article for what might be the third time, it dawns on me that I’m engaging in the exact behavior I’m writing about. “This article is great! This article sucks and I can’t believe you would ever consider publishing such drivel. You call yourself a writer, you should really consider a different career!” These are just some of the thoughts that grip my mind in the writing of this and countless other pieces.
I am well acquainted with perfectionism and the harmful thought patterns and anxiety that accompany it. The question is why? Why does the desire to be perfect permeate every aspect of our lives? What is the narrative being told to women that makes us feel like anything less than perfection is failure and what are the consequences that the pursuit of perfection has on our mental and physical health?
Enter Elizabeth Su. The writer, creator and the founder of Monday Vibes (an online newsletter and community for personal growth, wellness tips and regular self-care), is contagiously upbeat and completely devoted to the cause of mental and physical wellbeing. Especially for women. Her newsletter is jam packed with tips and advice on how we can all carve out a little more me time and hold space for ourselves. Elizabeth has studied perfectionism and burnout, saying goodbye to a corporate career to pursue a master’s degree at Columbia University in Clinical Psychology with a focus on Spirituality and Mind-Body practices and an advanced certification in Sexuality, Women and Gender.
But she isn’t just another self-proclaimed wellness guru or millennial life coach posting overused quotes (“If you can’t love me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best” and other stories). She has lived many lives fraught with burnout and the continuous drive for perfection. She understands the mind games we (especially women) play to keep our head in the game in the hopes that someday we will have real skin in the game.
When I first met Elizabeth, she was a breath of fresh air (and that’s saying a lot — air is controversial these days), the kind of person that so eloquently puts into words exactly what you’re thinking. I was curious about her experience with burnout which led her to leave a hot Silicon Valley startup and an impressive salary to start Monday Vibes, and wanted her perspective on why so many of us want to pursue corporate success in the first place?
“I’ve spent so long thinking about why I left the corporate world, that it’s been a long time since I’ve had the space to think about what motivated me in the first place, “she tells me over a virtual coffee chat.
“I come from a very academically minded family, my dad is a retired physician, and my mom is a professor at the University of Michigan, and I come from a feminist line of women — I grew up believing to my core that women can do anything. But like so many of us, I was motivated by the myth and the lifestyle that is pedaled to us — that “anything” equates to wealth and corporate success.”
I think back to my own rigid, over-scheduled and highly structured childhood — a carefully orchestrated game with rigid rules, for which the ultimate prize was financial success. I can relate.
“More recently, I’ve been exploring a different side of this and that is the pursuit of perfectionism and excellence to the point of burnout within the Asian-American community,” Elizabeth tells me. “I’ve awakened to my third-generation identity because my dad is Chinese, and my mom is white. Growing up in a predominantly white community, and working in companies with predominantly white employees, it was easy to ignore my heritage. In some ways, I now remember my life from a different lens and I see the ways in which I contorted myself to fit into a mold. In some ways I think my corporate and academic success came at the expense of that.”
This makes perfect sense to me. Elizabeth is in a space of reclamation, and part of that reclamation means reckoning with scars of racial trauma that we inherit from our family and ancestors. So much of the experience of racialized groups is about assimilation and trying to fit in.
“Through my work on oppression and burnout, I’ve discovered that they are inextricably linked to a culture of assimilation because it starts as something outside of you but over time it becomes internalized and you end up becoming your own oppressor,” she says.
Perfectionist tendencies in women and girls are well documented and start early. In a study by Girguiding UK, a quarter of girls aged seven to 10 years old, said they feel the need to be perfect. The ensuing result is that this pressure continues later in life, stifling creativity, ambition and risk taking in women — we are all familiar with the Hewlett Packard study that found women applied for a promotion when they met 100% of the qualifications, while men applied when they only met 50%.
Perfectionist pressure inevitably traps women in a vicious cycle of anxiety, constant fear of falling short, fear of failure and eventual burnout. These feelings are further compounded in BIPOC women that face a near-constant onslaught of microaggressions.
The corporate world is an ecosystem that fuels burnout, especially for women in marginalized and racialized groups. We are told to lean in but that becomes harder when the struggle is just to have a seat at the table.”
I ask Elizabeth about how perfectionist tendencies manifest in the world of work.
“The corporate world is an ecosystem that fuels burnout, especially for women in marginalized and racialized groups,” Elizabeth says. We are constantly expected to prove our worth in a discriminatory world. We are told to lean in but that becomes harder when the struggle is just to have a seat at the table. We put all this pressure on ourselves and the fear to try is greater when we don’t meet performance standards or mess up.”
Elizabeth’s words are triggering because of the truths they hold. I think back to my own life in the corporate world. Anxiety-filled days (and nights) up to my eyeballs in work in the fear that even a moment spent not being “busy,” could be perceived as a lack of dedication. I recall team meetings where my teammates wore their stress like a badge of honor. Being “swamped,” was not an occasional busy week. It was every week. I reflect on the ways in which my “failures,” were brought up in performance conversations — a typo in an email became a smoking gun for my lack of commitment to the company. I recall a manager criticizing my performance despite stellar reviews from my clients for the simple reason that my email inbox had reached its limit while I was on a three-day vacation (incidentally our email limit was 1/64th of the email limit in a Gmail account). Her reasoning when I questioned this —“We expect you to be responding to emails while on vacation.”
This trip down memory lane makes me question the pervasive narrative that burnout is self-inflicted. After-all companies are pouring money into mental-health programs, trainings and confidence workshops for women. Many have built sunlight filled yoga studios that sit empty at all hours of day. Employees can now bring dogs to work. So why are we overworked, underpaid and completely mentally depleted? How can we take breaks when the dominant culture is that we be available and plugged-in 24/7?
I think that belief is harmful because so many of us believe that our drive for excellence and perfection to the point of burnout comes from within when the reality is that it is our social conditioning. It’s not the full picture for people who really struggle with it.”
“I think that belief is harmful because so many of us believe that our drive for excellence and perfection to the point of burnout comes from within when the reality is that it is our social conditioning,” she says. “It’s not the full picture for people who really struggle with it. It’s very layered but I think at the crux of it is that the corporate world doesn’t really want women or anybody for that matter, to be empowered. The moment you’re empowered you’re no longer of value to the company. You’re either pushed out or sidelined until you self-select out.”
I ask Elizabeth about her experience in the startup world in Silicon Valley and what propelled her to leave.
“I think I was enamored to a certain degree by startup culture — I thought it was fun, fast-paced and creative and I could drink as much Kombucha-on-tap as I wanted. I really fell for the lifestyle. When I moved from consulting to tech and negotiated a six figure salary, I was on cloud nine. I felt like I was at the top of my game, especially because I was in account management, which is a coveted client facing position. I quickly realized though that it was the same story as my previous jobs all over again. I was constantly travelling; I was dealing with client demands and expectations around the clock, I would often fall sick from stress but continue working. I kept telling myself to push through and it would get better, but the reality was I was going in circles.”
Her words remind me of my own experience with career related burnout and the immense self-doubt and fear that comes with it. I ask her how she contextualized burnout at the time.
“It’s an interesting exercise we go through, especially women. We blame ourselves. We feel like if we are struggling it means there is something wrong with us, that we aren’t cutting it. And so, we work harder and longer to make up for those feelings. I blamed myself a lot during that time because I felt like I should be happy and grateful that I was able to achieve this dream.”
I had one foot in the corporate world and one foot in the personal growth world. I realized that they were at odds with each other. I started to want more and ask more of myself and my life.”
“I started therapy and went for my yoga teacher training and that’s when I broke down my own issues around people-pleasing and perfectionism,” she continues. I had one foot in the corporate world and one foot in the personal growth world. I realized that they were at odds with each other. I started to want more and ask more of myself and my life and to see how much of my time and labor (both emotional and physical) I was giving to a job and a company that at the end of the day cared about my work but didn’t really care about me.”
“There is so much scholarship and research around women and our tendency to people-please in the corporate world. What was your experience with that?” I ask her.
The research shows that women give and are often asked to give more emotional labor at work than men.”
“The research shows that women give and are often asked to give emotional labor at work. I started mentorship groups, created team training materials, sat on CSR (corporate social responsibility) committees. These are typically very female skewed jobs in the corporate world and often it’s not work we are compensated for — financially or in terms of career growth. I would find in addition to my job, I’d be committing so much time and energy to this extra work while many of my male colleagues were getting coveted projects or clients. When the time came around for promotions, they would have this body of work that they could speak to that the company prioritizes and values.”
I ask Elizabeth if there was an inciting incident that prompted her to leave.
“I wouldn’t say there was an inciting incident because I was at rock bottom for a long time. I left when there was no other option. I had an eating disorder, my anxiety levels were through the roof, I got violently sick right before my wedding because I was working up until the very last moment and so it was the last straw. It was around this time, that I was introduced to a woman who ran what I like to call Hogwarts for entrepreneurs, a course that intertwined spirituality and business. And a lightbulb went off in my head where I realized that there was a different way to do things. I was surrounded by other women entrepreneurs, and I found a lot of creative energy and passion. It fueled me to keep going in the corporate world while building my business until I could finally leave.”
“I moved from corporate to school to pursue my masters at Columbia University and I built my business alongside this,” she tells me. Like all businesses I’ve pivoted many times and taken different directions but at the core of what I’m doing has always been my mission to support women who are hitting their threshold, help them hold space for themselves and ultimately change the rules of the game.”
My conversation with Elizabeth is a reminder of my own beliefs around success and happiness. Beliefs that I have carried my entire life. As a woman of color, that tried and thrived for a while in the corporate world, many of Elizabeth’s anecdotes hit home. A former disciple of lean-in feminism I too contorted myself, denied my experiences and gaslighted myself to suit a narrative of success. But I realize that you can only do that for so long. Eventually burnout catches up to you. Eventually that nagging voice that this isn’t what’s meant for you becomes too loud to ignore. Eventually, if you empower yourself you will either be pushed out or self-select out.
Like Elizabeth, I have since pivoted my career and my business and now identify as an artist and a creative. I’ve had to drastically change my life to suit this new career I am building for myself, and yet everyday I have thoughts that gnaw at me. Am I working enough? Am I being productive enough? Like so many women I too carry the scars of burnout. This isn’t to say that this is everyone’s experience or that burnout culture is universal or there aren’t companies that are trying to address burnout in their employees. Many people go on to have wonderful, fulfilling corporate careers. But burnout in corporate women is prevalent enough to be worth talking about.
Women like Elizabeth give me hope. Hope that there is an alternative path, a way to be empowered and a way to lean into your authenticity and use your gifts to serve others. It’s a process of rewiring your brain, your conditioning, your very central nervous system and unwiring it from the narrative that if you’re not perfect, why even bother? So I am left with a thought. How many of us are still out there, trying to compete in spaces that were never created for us? How long will women bear the burden of emotional and physical burnout before the game changes? And how long before burning the candle on both ends permanently extinguishes our fire?
