High Achiever Experiences Flop Era and Accepts Help

Maggie Slepian

My desire to be perfect shows up in myriad ways. I have a high-functioning daily routine of work and exercise, I keep my house and yard as tidy as possible, and I always file articles early. If I feel like things are slipping even one bit, I’m convinced I’ll spiral and lose control over my entire life.

This desire to perform perfectly at all times has been helpful in my freelance career, where work is partially determined by your reliability. By filing early and with clean copy, I’ve become a go-to writer for a number of anchor clients. While this is beneficial to my career, it’s also because I can’t mentally let myself perform poorly. The outdoor world (and readers of this blog) are often overachievers, setting high standards for performance, fitness, and training schedules that allow for goal accomplishment. The mindset can be helpful, but when you don’t meet these expectations, there is little room to be generous with yourself.

I’ve had a few extended flop eras, where I’ve taken on too much and underperformed across the board, and these times haunt me. But more recently, a three-week flop era sent me into a total tailspin and reminded me that A) I can’t always be perfect and B) I need to accept help.

I got sick right at the start of the year. I tested negative for covid, but what might have been a moderate cold for someone with a better immune system laid me flat out. By the time I dragged myself to Urgent Care, it had turned into a nasty respiratory infection and I had to choke down a round of antibiotics I swear were for a large horse. Aside from being sick, I live alone in a large house and work for myself, so when I can’t stay on top of household chores and assignments, I feel a panicked loss of control.

It will come as no surprise that I afforded myself no grace during this period, instead fixating on the disappointment of not seeing my boyfriend before he left for Japan, canceling social plans, and working from bed while my house became a germ-infested sick ward. I felt disgusted by my inability to stay on top of dishes and laundry, turning down friends’ offers for help lest they see me in such a state.

During this time, we got our only real snow and cold of the winter, and it was extreme. The air temperature got down to -45°, and it snowed for days on end. I was too sick to shovel my driveway, instead packing the snow into a sheet of ice when I drove to the pharmacy for medication. I was so out of it that I didn’t plan for the severe weather by shutting off my water or letting my faucets drip, and one morning I woke up to no running water and frozen pipes.

At this point, it was too much. I called my dad in a panic and he kept me calm, pulling over on the side of the road to squint at the FaceTime screen as I stumbled around my sub-zero crawlspace with a headlamp, trying to locate my main water valve and avoid catastrophic flooding from burst pipes. On his instructions I drove white-knuckled to the hardware store in near-zero visibility for heaters and extension cords, fighting painful breathing and trying not to hurt my lungs in the -39° weather.

My tight grip on control had slipped, and I was not doing well. My garage door cable had snapped two days before and the repair had put me over budget for the month. My driveway was a sheet of ice, my pipes were frozen, and I had no running water. I spent the next two days in a state of buzzing anxiety, moving the space heaters every hour to thaw sections of pipe, stressing about a potential space heater fire adding to the mess.

Despite really needing help, I couldn’t allow myself to accept it. One evening before he left the country, my boyfriend dropped off ginger ale for my antibiotic-riddled stomach and offered to shovel the driveway before he drove home. I desperately wanted to accept, but I couldn’t bring myself to say yes. I pictured being slumped on the couch listening to the scrape of the shovel, unable to help and offering nothing as he toiled in the driveway. I assured him it was fine, sending him on his way with profuse thanks for the soda and takeout. Before he left he brought my garbage and recycling bins in from the end of the driveway where I’d left them for days.

My friends also offered help, and I similarly refused. Something about being low functioning, spending my day in bed with dishes accumulating in the sink was humiliating; a far cry from my need to be the High Functioning One. These friends know me well though, and ignored my refusal. One showed up at night with a tub of soup, and the next day, three of them appeared on my porch with a single Crumbl cookie they’d driven across town to procure. I heard their feet stomping up my snowy steps to deliver one cookie in a pink box and I almost cried.

I have projected so much self worth onto being as high functioning (perfect!) as possible that admitting I was down for the count felt shameful. But without my boyfriend’s takeout deliveries, my friends’ emotional support cookie, and my dad on FaceTime walking me through the pipe thawing process, the three-week flop era would have felt entirely unmanageable, plus my house would have probably flooded.

There’s no SEO-friendly service message or “expert interview” here, but maybe, since so many posts on this site focus on the challenges of high expectations, the message might land. I am trying to accept that I will not always function at my highest level, and it’s not a sign of failure to be so sick I can’t shovel my driveway. And as I get back to my preferred daily routine, the help that did come my way, whether I actively accepted it or not, made a really, really big difference. Thanks for the cookie, girls.