From a distance, someone who lives by high standards looks like a puppet on strings, yet the strings are not tied to that person's wrists but held in their hands: they are not the puppet, they are the one holding it. What has been watched for years as ambition, care and confidence is a figure a person moves with their own hands, and feels in their own body with every movement it makes.
At first the puppet works like a voodoo doll, because the one holding it believes they are one and the same: when the puppet's arm is bent, their own arm aches, when the puppet stumbles they feel the shame of having fallen themselves, and as long as the distance between them stays invisible, whatever happens to the puppet counts as having happened to them.
The doll has a strange asymmetry: praise lands on the puppet, criticism goes straight to the hand. When someone likes the work, the appreciation stays on the surface of the figure and rarely reaches the one holding it, because they know it was the performance being applauded and not themselves; but the slightest criticism travels up the string, through the bar and into the fingers, where it stays for days. Worth, then, is not solid ground but a grade handed out again after every performance, and that person feels only as good as their last one.
Of the strings hanging from the bar in their hands, one is older and tied deeper: a quiet conviction that they are behind their peers, less gifted than them, and that sooner or later they will certainly fall short. This conviction is not conditional and stays in place whatever is done, because it comes not from a behaviour but from something learned about the self very early on.
The other string was attached later and is, in truth, an answer to the first: if the only way to keep inadequacy out of sight is to do everything flawlessly, the standard has to be kept at the very top. The sentence the first string carries is "I am not enough", the second replies "then I must be without fault", and the meticulousness that looks like ambition from the outside is a cover drawn over the conviction underneath.
This is exactly why the two strings complete each other, because the high standard was built to resolve the sense of inadequacy and only ever feeds it: every goal hung at an unreachable height ends in "not enough", that result confirms the conviction beneath once more, and the confirmed conviction asks for the next goal to be hung a little higher. The pursuit of flawlessness feeds the conviction while the conviction enlarges the need for flawlessness, and the two ends of the loop, drawing strength from one another, keep it standing for years.
The same hand does not always pull the same way. Some days it draws the strings as tight as they will go and cannot let a piece of work leave its hands until every side of it has been understood and every detail checked; some days it does not lift the bar at all and keeps away from anything that could be evaluated; and some days it swings to the opposite extreme and behaves as though the standard did not matter, because someone who never tries never has to learn that they fell short. These states, which from the outside look like three different people, are three ways of holding the same bar, and all three exist so as not to touch the same conviction.
Let me give it a name: living suspended. Living suspended is the stance of someone who, having lost the distance between themselves and the figure in their hands, mistakes the puppet's hanging in mid-air for their own life; as the strings pull upward on one side and downward on the other, the puppet never touches the floor, and the one holding it can never quite feel their own feet on the ground.
It was not they who tied the strings. In a home where acceptance was tied to achievement, where a good mark brought the next expectation more than it brought praise, where what was missing was seen more clearly than what was whole, and where an ordinary mistake was met like a small catastrophe, the bar is placed in a child's hands so early that the child never notices holding it, and because moving the puppet flawlessly really did bring love in that home, the lesson was not wrong for its time. The adults in that home had usually inherited the same bar from their own childhoods, and they gave what they gave because they believed it was love.
The most insidious thing about these strings is that they are not always tied with a harsh voice. An embrace that comes only after success, a look that softens when the school report is good, a "well done" handed out as a reward are strings too, and among the strongest, because the child recognises them not as punishment but as love, and hardly anyone thinks of cutting a string that is tied to love. A child raised this way does carry out what is expected, but out of an inner compulsion rather than a choice, and inside what looks from the outside like willing diligence, a debt is always being repaid.
Nor is the bar the invention of a single home. In a world where competition, comparison and the pressure to achieve keep rising, the expectation and criticism that younger generations perceive from their parents have grown over the years too, and when a family ties these strings to a child, it is often tying its own fear, the fear that the child will be left behind in such a world.
In adulthood the same strings begin to do another kind of work. When every task has to be grasped completely and every detail checked, there is never enough time, where time runs short discouragement arrives, and after discouragement comes that strange freezing: being unable to begin, putting things off, abandoning something already started. This freezing, mistaken from the outside for laziness, is in fact its opposite, because work that has not been started cannot yet fail, and for as long as that person delays, they are spared from coming face to face with the conviction underneath.
What causes the freezing is usually not the string above but the one below: high goals on their own tend to move a person forward, and what brings the work to a halt is the fear of falling short that waits beneath them, along with that never-closing distance between who one is and who one ought to be. When the hand on the bar pulls both strings as tight as they will go at once, the puppet does not move, it trembles where it stands, and a life that swings between working eighteen hours a day and being unable to begin at all is that trembling itself.
In childhood these strings had a reward, today they have none. The voice that asked about what was missing fell silent long ago, but the hand still grips the same old bar, and the strings no longer buy acceptance, they only exact a price: as the pressure on oneself rises, performance falls, an hour's work stretches across four, rest becomes possible without guilt only when illness arrives, and tiredness slowly turns into burnout. The defence that once protected the child no longer protects the adult, it pushes them into the very thing they were fleeing, into not keeping up and being left behind.
The price is not paid at work alone. Intimacy requires one's flaws to be seen, and a life built on hiding them can only allow intimacy from a certain distance; that person experiences being loved as a performance too, keeps a running grade even within a relationship of how good a partner, how good a friend they are, and cannot let go of the bar even beside the person closest to them. The same happens in the very room where they seek help for themselves: they try to do getting better like homework, wonder whether they are being a good client, and hold the strings tight even in the place they came to loosen them.
None of this is vanity or weakness, and the fact that it was not they who tied the strings does not change. But the bar is now in their hands, and for someone who spent years believing they were the puppet, this is both the heaviest and the most freeing thing to know: tying the strings was not their choice, cutting them is in their hands.
Cutting has its grief, because the strings being cut held up a performance that drew applause for years; that person lets go not only of a burden but of a stance that has defined who they were until now, and the pain of that letting go is not the grief of something lost but of something paid for at a very high price.
Cutting is not throwing the puppet away. The craft, attentiveness and respect for effort that person has gained over the years remain where they are, and only the compulsion goes; high goals are not a burden in themselves, often they even carry a person forward, and what exhausts and freezes them is the fear of falling short that waits beneath those goals. The string that loosens most is very often that fear itself, and for someone who has spent years believing they were a prisoner of their own high standards, this is surprising news: the standard can stay, the fear can go.
The strings are rarely cut all at once; they are cut one by one: an email sent without a fourth reading, a piece of work handed in as "good enough", a rest taken without first falling ill. With every string cut, the puppet comes down a little further, and one day, as the puppet's feet touch the floor, the one holding it notices that their own feet have been standing there for years.
