Yesterday my friend Jessica stopped by for a quick visit to say goodbye before she and her husband leave for three weeks overseas.
When she arrived, I had just finished my workday and was barefoot, with no makeup, wearing an old pilled sundress, with my hair pulled back. Our living room was (and is) a jumbled mess of half-packed boxes and clutter.
Never once did it occur to me to try to look more put-together or to straighten up my apartment for her visit. That’s because ours is a real friendship, not a performative one.
My partner and I enjoyed an hourlong conversation with Jessica on our patio, sitting on mismatched pillows atop a rusted wrought-iron chairs we trash-picked from the alley a few months ago.
What a contrast to a few years ago, when I would host gatherings in this same apartment to try to build a community of friends.
I would spend the entire day getting ready for these evening gatherings.
I would clean my apartment top to bottom, painstakingly do my hair and makeup, carefully select an outfit, shop for hours to buy food and small home-decor items, and put together a table full of refreshments.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying maintaining a well-kept home, adorning oneself and looking nice, or taking care in preparing good food for guests.
The keyword is “enjoying.”
I wasn’t really enjoying being a hostess for my gatherings back in 2019, not because of the guests but because of my anxiety and my perfectionist expectations.
I didn’t consciously realize I wasn’t enjoying the hostessing experience. But looking back, I was going through the motions of hostessing the “right” way (sterile-level clean and magazine worthy) because I believed that’s how I and my home had to look in order for people to accept and like me.
Looking back, I see now that I was operating out of a culturally programmed implant of perfectionism, and it was not only harming me, it probably made a lot of my guests feel uncomfortable, too.
Perfectionism is poison.
The irony is that the guests who were my true tribe didn’t really care what I or my apartment looked like. As long as nothing was actually dirty, they would have been happy to hang out with me if I were wearing sweatpants and tube socks and served them a big plastic bowl of microwave popcorn.
On the other hand, I remember one woman I’d invited who showed up to my first of these gatherings. She and I had met at one of those “make new friends” group dinners for newcomers to the city. I don’t remember her name, but I remember that during that group dinner, she had bragged about the exclusive and expensive waterfront condo she and her husband had just purchased.
I’ll never forget the look on her face when she arrived at my get-together and