The trouble with being a millennial perfectionist

I’d never questioned my future before. Foolish or naive, I'd always assumed that life would play out with the comforting certainty of the Disney films I had obsessed over as a lonely child.

Obstacles would be overcome, testing trials would prove valuable lessons, hard work would be rewarded. Everything was going to work out. I was guaranteed a happy-ever-after. 

My fairy-tale ending? To become an actress. I was the youngest of a family of thespians, my parents and both my older siblings were all actors. Since learning to walk I was eagerly chasing the family business, convinced the industry would welcome me with open arms.

But, at 18, all I had to show for my efforts were years of rejection and hundreds of unsuccessful auditions. So I decided to move to London to train at drama school. I hoped I’d feel at home there, that I’d fit in and find my kind.

But I felt more unsure of myself than ever and, three years later, I was a graduate with £30,000 worth of debt. Finally, surely, it was my time to shine then? I had earned it, hadn’t I?

Another two years of fruitless and frustrating auditions followed. It was becoming hard to deny: Disney hadn’t prepared me for this. I did not feel shiny at all.  

Things were not going to script, and not just with my career. I’d had a string of unhealthy relationships, an ongoing battle with depression and a felt a crippling uneasiness in myself. Angry, bitter and deeply despondent, I had been cheated and it wasn’t fair!

Now, I can imagine what you’re thinking – because I thought it as well and I sometimes still do: Welcome to the real world, Rosie. This is what we adults call “growing up”. 

Well, that’s certainly part of it. We all have those realisations on the path from childhood to adulthood that life can be hard, that you can’t always get what you want (and, in fact, you rarely get what you want) and sometimes good doesn’t triumph over evil nor love conquer all. 

But from where I’m standing, from what I’ve experienced, and from what I’ve learned from talking to my peers, this is more than just a disenchantment with childhood fairy tales. 

These feelings of disillusionment and disappointment, this insidious anxiety, the feeling that failure is inevitable are, I discovered when I put aside my shame and decided to talk about how I felt, widespread. Chronic.

According to a Canadian study published earlier this year, today’s young adults are harder on themselves than any other previous generation, and the majority of 18-to-25-year-olds showing signs of what the researchers termed “multidimensional perfectionism”.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Bulletin, looked at data for college students from the late 1980s to 2016, and found that young adults today feel significantly more pressure to measure up to their peers. They also tend to judge others by harsh standards.

Only last week, 18-year-old British Olympic snowboarder Ellie Soutter died, reportedly having taken her own life after missing a flight to team training session. Her father, Tony, said that the stresses placed on elite sportspeople may have been a contributing factor in his daughter's death.

While there is some comfort in knowing that I'm not alone in my anxiety, that it could be a generation thing, I wanted to know why we were feeling this way. So began something of a quest. It transpires that it wasn’t to be a long quest, but, like most quests, it really was a journey towards myself.

It’s totally normal to question ourselves, to doubt our actions and our choices, and even to ask ourselves if we are Good People, but people like me haven’t just been psychoanalysing ourselves. Everyone else has been doing it too.

Because I’m a millennial. And that, according to the media, is not a good thing. We’re selfish, directionless, entitled, ungrateful, narcissistic, self-pitying, self-involved. Self, self, selfie. 

Obsessed with social media, strangers to hard work and offended by just about everything, we’re ‘snowflakes’. The let-down generation and we know it, we feel it, we carry it around with us: the disappointment of an older generation.

The generation who had free university education and the greatest benefits from the welfare system.

The generation that reaped the rewards of a booming housing market and are enjoying, or heading for, a comfortable retirement.

Leaving who exactly to deal with the environmental and social consequences of rampant, unsustainable consumer capitalism? That would be me, and my generation. Who pay through the nose for their education, can only dream of owning their own home, and will likely never retire.

Maybe millennials are soft, entitled and selfish, but doesn’t every generation think this of its successors? With access to everything in the palm of our smartphone-filled hands, our ambitions are greater than ever.

We are taught to dream big. But when we weep for our underachievements, we are “entitled”. Encouraged to be perfectionists, we’ve been set up to fail: nothing will ever be good enough.

And it’s this that makes mine more than simply a story about a girl growing up. It makes it the story of a generation. With their specific anxieties and blessings, hopes and expectations. Specifically of interest to me was the huge gap between millennials’ expectations and reality – and how easy it is to get trapped in the chasm between them. 

So, like any self-respecting millennial, I wrote a play about it.

Eighteen months ago, I started writing my own poems, rhythmic explosions of thoughts and dilemmas that had been festering away.  

Initially I wrote cathartic personal stuff, but I wanted to use the musicality of spoken word to tell a story. I didn’t know what the story was about, just that there was a young woman trying to make sense of life. A story that would reflect the world that I experience.

That’s when Narcissist in the Mirror was born. I finished a script and, with some beautiful direction from my mum, Sue Jenkins (Brookside’s Jackie Corkhill), the play began to take shape.

Narc, the play's protagonist, isn’t me, but it doesn’t take Poirot to work out there are some clear similarities. 

Like Narc, I was needy, finding comfort in relationships, the good and the bad ones. Narc is exceptionally reliant on love; it’s her one constant. When everything else is going wrong, she finds solace in the knowledge that someone loves her.

Her need to be needed dwarves mine, but her compulsion is all too common today. And yet, she’s desperately alone. Whether this is in spite of her neediness, or because of it, is for the audience to decide. That’s one of the joys of Narc: she really divides opinion. Victim or villain? Or, like most of us, is she a bit of both. Binary thinking is so 20th-century, after all. 

 I’m not offended when people ask if Narc is me, she’s brave and honest and I’ve aspired to be a little bit more like her since playing the part. It’s a bit like the chicken and the egg, what came first? I wrote her, but she’s helped me grow. 

If life had gone to plan, I wouldn’t have written Narcissist in the Mirror and I wouldn’t be taking it to the Edinburgh Fringe.

But I’m a millennial and I failed – and, for once, I couldn’t be happier about it.

Rosie Fleeshman is in Narcissist in the Mirror at The Attic Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh (pleasance.co.uk), at 3:15pm every day until August 31