Me and my partner are enjoying a quiet weekend at home🥰

When I felt angry the response I received was that I was ‘being spoilt’. The message I learned about myself is that I am not good enough.

Since the start of the year I’ve been working my way through ‘The Seven Sisters book’ series by Lucinda Riley, I’m in love with everything about these books🥰🥰🥰currently on book 4, The Pearl Sister✨

I had this experience just today!🙈 I work for a beautiful (and very luxury) 5*hotel and we get a special perk of booking a staff stay, and so I have just booked a stay as a surprise for my partners birthday next week. All the rooms are beautiful, and there is usually a dedicated room allocated for staff stays, and my manager approached me today with an offer of a complimentary upgrade to pick which room I would like. I know all the rooms really well and The first room she suggested I knew wasn’t my favourite as it can suffer a bit with a mould smell which I shared, and so I apologetically turned it down. She then gave me another 4 rooms to choose from, I asked if I could have a think about it, picked a room then got completely overwhelmed in my head with fear of picking ‘the wrong room’ (perfectionist much🤣) and asked to change it to another room, at which point my manager explained it may no longer be a possibility to change it again🙈 All of this happened within my office with other people able to hear the conversation, and I noticed myself thinking ‘what is wrong with me’, why couldn’t I just have picked one room and been grateful especially as it’s an upgrade. Then I noticed shame and emotions of despair and angst and embarrassment at what other people would think of me. My face felt very hot, and my brain went all fuzzy and cloudy. After I thought ‘what’s wrong with me’, I replayed and analysed the conversation with my manager quite a few times in my head, felt even more embarrassed and cringe about what I’d said, wished I could redo the conversation, then started to offer myself compassion for being human, observing the conversation from a more detached neutral place, realising I am well liked in my team and that in the grand scheme of things a conversation about hotel room preferences is not a big deal, and whichever room we stay in we’re going to have a lovely time.🙏 This is a longstanding pattern I have noticed where I think my conversations and responses need to be ‘perfect’ so that I am neither ‘too much’ or ‘too little’ in other people’s thoughts of me, it is truly exhausting at times to experience and can lead to me losing out on or sabotaging opportunities in my life as a result.🙃

When I reflect on this question, I collectively notice that I come away from small and large experiences that trigger shame with a combination of ‘ I’m too much and not enough’ all in one and it happens more regularly in day to day life than I had realised. Then follows the self gas lighting over analysing and criticism of my reactions/responses. Thankfully I also realise do have a supportive inner parent/neutral voice that gently challenge those thoughts and is filled with compassion and kind questions such as ‘is this really true’, and ‘it’s ok to be you’, and ‘what are you making this mean about yourself’ etc Definitely background perfection creeping in on the scene also behaving like an internal secret critic in my sub conscious.