I'm no Denzel Washington

... a continuation of 'Christianity with an Itchy Butt'

I was born August 12th, 1991 in New Jersey, a place which is best known for becoming the first state to ratify the Bill of Rights. It is known for nothing else. You got that? My first birthday party was a smashing success, and I have to make sure I don’t spend what remains of my life resting on the laurels of this fact. I was born the youngest child. Well, I guess I was born the same age that everyone else is when he or she is born, but what I mean is that I was the last one in my family to be born. This has been a monumental detail throughout my life story, flowing through the undercurrent of most things I have done and most every interaction I have had.

In my formative years, when I was like warm hunk of dough, I always had people to look up to—people that did everything first. I consulted my big brothers and my sister before my every move, entirely without their permission or knowledge. I watched them and just thought, “oh that makes sense,” or “oh, I think I would have done that differently.” I never had to take charge, so I never did. Finding myself in this environment—having models and pioneers already established and conveniently sleeping in the rooms surrounding mine—it seemed best for me to enter life as an observer and learner, and that is what I did. This reserved, reliable approach led me to being pretty good at a lot of things, which has always been one of my most crippling characteristics.

I have always been an excellent learner. I don’t mean this in a pure academic sense. I don’t think I started as a good student or anything; I just was quick to calculate how to become one. The same goes with sports. I was quick to determine what worked and what didn’t, and therefore I was quick to learn how to be decent at those, too. If I am given a chance to observe and practice, I will become pretty proficient at most tasks. It is like there are these constantly adapting algorithms cycling through my system which determine what steps will end in good results and what will not, and they are very precise. This is not an attempt for me to brag about the things I am good at, because I do not think there is anything worth any bit of conceit. I can’t stress this enough. Well I guess I could have amplified the stress with a couple more sentences about it, but I’m excellent at being succinct. I say that with great sarcasm. Anyway, I’m just trying to make a point that I am pretty good at learning to do most things successfully, and this led me to a pretty perilous place. It led me to a position where people wanted to call me perfect—the most horrifying word I think you can attribute to a human being.

Going way back to when I was a wee little elementary school kid with a flawless mushroom cut, it is all I ever heard. I was relentlessly told I was perfect. I mean, my mushroom was immaculate. I couldn’t even go near music festivals as a youngster, for the sole reason that delirious hippies would try to take bites out of my dome. Not a single hair out of place, but I digress. I was good at mental math, I could shoot a basketball, and I could draw, so people thought that was sufficient cause to label me perfect. “Oh, Matt Parra, he is so perfect.” Even other parents would say it. I doubt they ever meant any harm, but it was always a stupid thing for them to say. This lasted throughout high school, until college when I think people finally witnessed my countless failings. What a blessing that was. As Steinbeck put it, “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” College wasn’t for some time, though.

My nickname on my high school soccer team was “God”, for God’s sake. There was even an article in the newspaper mentioning this, so all the locals could know which god was in jurisdiction of their area. In addition to toeing the line of blasphemy, this heavenly handle was also a pretty heavy burden. Anyone who doesn’t think it was causing damage to a fella’s psyche was mistaken. I did a decent job of not letting it inflate my head, meaning I never became an arrogant little turd who didn’t think his poop smelled or anything like that, but all the “perfect” talk took its toll.

What this designation as being “perfect” led me to was unachievable expectations of myself. I think some people come into the world as perfectionists, and I think that is wild and impressive. A little sick, but wild and impressive. These people are fulfilled by things being flawless, and are plagued by anything less. It eats at their heart when there is anything less. I am not one of them. I don’t think I was ever meant to be a perfectionist, it was imposed on me. It has been a weight since then, trying to be something I’m not. People had this understanding of me which I fully know could not be further from the truth. Well I guess it could be further from the truth, but I would say that I am about the same distance to perfect as anyone else. I knew they were wrong, but I hate disappointing or even just surprising people, so I learned how to live in a way that made me appear as perfect as reality would allow.

I avoided confession at all costs. I’m not referring to the secular kind, but specifically the kind where you confront God incarnated as a priest behind a grille in an ornate closet. After my first confession in third grade which brought me one step closer to life as an ideal Catholic, I think I had a 10 year run of not participating in the sacrament. It wasn’t a laziness or an apathy thing. It was a conscious choice to repress the realities of my broken existence. Once in a while during high school, our religion teacher would take us to the chapel for a chance to meet with the school chaplain and purge ourselves of any and all repugnant, pubescent sins that were clogging up our souls. I would elect to spend that time sitting in a pew playing Tetris on my laptop. A full decade I spent incapable of telling a priest I was not perfect, because I did not want to tell it to myself. I didn’t even realize what was happening. I just told myself I didn’t feel like going through the formal motions, convinced that I prayed sufficiently in a private space to achieve adequate forgiveness from God. It was a nauseous lack of self-awareness I had back then.

When I lived this life—creating an image that was 1000% illusion—it introduced a lot of fears, but not the good kind. Not the kind that ultimately drive you to some divine place of human achievement, a place only MLK and Kevin McAllister and select others have been, just the kind that hang around no matter what you do to dispel them. The fears that take the joy out of things that can be joyful.

One is the fear of failure. This is no curveball, so to speak. Nothing revolutionary. I realize I am not alone in fighting this monster, but it is still hard to admit to. The fear of failure has been like a well-trained tiger tied around my waste. I can know it won’t hurt me, because of the training and all, but there’s still a terrifying animal following me around, so self-talk and reason alone are not quite enough to alleviate the fear. It has kept me from moving in so many different directions, kept me from doing so many different things. I am pretty sure it is ultimately why I stopped playing baseball in high school. A game in which failing two out of three times is considered successful was a really difficult thing for me to deal with. I had a bat in my hand and what felt like a baseball in my chest every time I had to step up to the plate, knowing that all odds indicated that I would not succeed, and thinking that failure would change others’ perceptions. The wisest decision, the one that would best protect my image, was just to remove myself from the game. There were other reasons why I stopped playing, and I never really thought of this one before, but now that I have, I would say it was an underlying factor.

The baseball example was more of a metaphor. It actually happened, but it is a metaphor for a lot of other similar moments of fleeing the opportunity for failure. I’m having a hard time thinking of specific instances right now; they are too ubiquitous to single out. Maybe they’ll come to the surface as I continue to make waves beneath it.

Another fear was the fear of rejection, because I thought being rejected means there must be a defect. Again, nothing astounding or unique to my life. No one is going to read this and immediately write into the New York Times or JAMA or Us Weekly about a new breakthrough in clinical psychology, but it took a while for me to recognize the influence of this fear. It manifests in things as simple as the colleges I applied to, to things I failed to get involved with at school, to relationships, to romantic relationships. I was just never great about putting myself out there. If I was out there, it meant someone could take a swing. Like a piñata. That whole aspect of parties was always too aggressive for me. There was definitely no piñata at my first birthday.

I have some phenomenal friendships—really life-altering ones that hopefully I will get a chance to illuminate with the dimming spotlight of reflection—but I think I’ve probably missed out on a lot as well. I had a girlfriend, and we dated for a couple years. It was a pretty big risk for me to open myself like that, but then she broke up with me. This didn’t help allay the whole fear of rejection problem. In the end, I am happy that it didn’t work out, because it was never going to. Regardless, I had a hard time making myself vulnerable enough, being honest enough with whom I am, to give myself another chance. I kept telling myself it just hasn’t happened yet, but I probably needed to make something happen in order for something to happen. It sounds pretty simple, and that’s because it is, but it was and is a challenge for me. Now I’m not in some spiraling state thinking that the love of my life has slipped away, and that it’s all a lost cause from here, and that I might as well become a priest or a grow a goatee. I honestly have never had a second when I felt this way. I just need to make sure I put myself out there, to avoid feeling this way sometime down the line. So that’s one example of how the fear of rejection has sort of found its way into things.

Sure enough, it is in my relationships that I have always found the most efficacious antidote for these fears, especially for the fear of relationship. These relationships, in all their forms, are the only perfections I know. I wish that didn’t have to sound so damn cheesy, because it couldn’t feel more real.

#personalnarrative