Everyone has heard the stereotype of immigrant parents who push their children to get perfect grades and to one day become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer.

 Obviously not everyone is the same, but in my case this stereotype was true. My parents always pushed me and my older sister to get all A’s and to become a doctor or lawyer. 

And it worked. 

We grew up consistently getting good grades. We were always getting glowing reviews from our teachers during parent-teacher conferences. Our parents were always so proud of us. And if we got a lower grade, they would try to help us. They were never the type to get angry with us over a grade. They never put an unhealthy amount of pressure on us. However, that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel it.

Experiencing all this academic validation only made me crave it more.

I began to obsess over my grades and what my teachers thought of me. I would sob over a B — which is a great grade — because I could not fathom not being the perfect, smart daughter. I would panic if my teacher told me and my friends to be quiet because I had to be the best student. 

Over the years, I began to despise school. The days felt longer, and I felt like I was on auto-pilot, just doing the bare minimum. It felt like I was dragging myself through school, just waiting to go home. The pressure began to feel like a physical weight on my chest, slowly dragging me down. The thing is, I didn’t know where all of this pressure had come from.

One day, one of my previous teachers and I were talking, and she asked me if I ever felt like the reason I thought I had to do so well in school was to show my parents that everything they did to get us here, and all their hard work, wasn’t for nothing. 

After that, I realized that I felt like I had an obligation to do well and succeed in school to prove to my parents that all that they had done and sacrificed to build a good future for us was not a waste. That their efforts to get us here weren’t taken for granted.

That was when I realized that the burden I felt on my shoulders for so long had been placed there by me. I felt the need to be perfect all the time because I didn’t want my parents to feel like they wasted their efforts. My parents never led me to believe they felt that way, but once I got into that headspace, I couldn’t get myself out for the longest time. 

It was not until school started getting harder and I got lower grades than I usually did that I realized always having to be perfect was not healthy or sustainable. I realized that I was the only person expecting me to be perfect, and that my family only ever wanted me to do my best.