Overachievers: The Battle Arena of Insecurity

Words by Siangling Tan

I am an Overachiever,

and an incredibly annoying smart-ass.

During the majority of the past school year, I was a bossy know-it-all who annoyed the hell out of friends and acquaintances forced to work with me.

Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll say it’s the truth.

But I’m not afraid to admit it.



Everything I’m responsible for, every project, every assignment, will be blown up ten times in my overactive and disorganized brain and start stressing out as I strive to achieve that bloated and exaggerated goal. And frankly, it brings me plenty of misery, but it almost always pays off.

Behold the culprit that fueled these tirades of emotions and this mindless rant.



Here's a little bit of background information:

AP courses are 5.0 courses taken in high school, (regular classes are 4.0 and honors 4.5) In addition to the 5.0 to average out your GPA(grade point average), an AP exam is taken at the end of the school year and based on your results from said exams, you'll be graded on a scale of 1 to 5. A score of 3 to 5 will enable you to get college credit for that particular course and anything lower that a 3 is considered failing.

So, as you can see, I passed. Barely.

It's really not that bad.

For any non-overachiever.

I was aiming for a 5, and imagine my anguish as I lay my bespectacled eyes on that small 3, which is tantamount to a symbol of my demise.

Now I'm just being a drama queen.*

The tragedy of being an overachiever is that anything less that perfect is deemed unsatisfactory. I was tortured by my inability to be concert mistress for any considerable period of time, and as I was stressing out about my playing tests**, a friend commented truthfully, albeit a bit tactlessly, that I am only doing this to satisfy my ego.

Ego. That's it. The magical word that sums up the reasons behind the overachieving overachiever.

Or is it?

Insecurity. That, in my humble opinion is the true reason behind any overachieving overachiever.

We all strive to be loved and admired, and thus the desire for acceptance is a constant forward force in our journey to success, or rather, the journey in search for reassurance that we are capable of great deeds and therefore deserve love and admiration.

It's a fine line between being an overachiever and a perfectionist. In a world riddled with talented young adults like the readers and writers of this blog, I am forced to be both in order to survive in the midst of such brilliance. Being as I am is ultimately the way for me to hide my insecurities and to mask the feeling of inferiority in order to survive in the world as we know it.

I am not the only one who harbors such feelings, nor do I claim to be absolutely unique. There are millions upon millions of individuals with the ability to outshine me in every aspect imaginable, and I wholly accept that fact. But that in no way means that I should falter in achieving my definition of success and fulfillment. Striving for excellence is admirable, but ultimately, the first step on the endeavor is self-acceptance. Being able to admit your flaws, to laugh at yourself, and to handle everything with a sense of humor is of the utmost importance.

I'm not fully capable of doing that as of now, but at least I feel so much better for getting a 3.



*Editor's note: Indeed.
**For non-America residents and/or the non-musically inclined, Siangling takes Orchestra in school, and occasionally sits for playing tests.