Amy Scott Rooker Thought Perfectionism Was Her Superpower — It Wasn’t

Amy Scott Rooker woke up sitting on the floor of a shower, hot water pouring over her shoulders. She couldn’t figure out how she got there — not just the bathroom, but her body. Her life.

Hours earlier, after prolonged stress, exhaustion, and unhealthy coping habits, she experienced a medical episode and collapsed in the bathroom.

The collapse itself wasn’t the shock. It was how long she had been disappearing before it.

The Life That Looked Good On Paper

By the time of the seizure, Rooker had already mastered the art of vanishing in plain sight, a pattern she traces in her debut memoir, My Mother Is a Dragonfly. She had the degrees: a law degree and an MBA. The firm job. The polish. The discipline. The kind of composure that reads as competence in a conference room and self-control at a dinner party. She was the woman who had it together.

But it came at a cost.

For years, Rooker believed perfectionism was a form of strength.

“I thought if I could just be impressive enough, thin enough, controlled enough, then nothing else about me would matter,” she says.

What she later came to understand was something far more unsettling: it had never really been about excellence. It had been about safety.

“Perfectionism is not a personality trait,” she says. “It is a survival strategy. It is what you reach for when love feels conditional and safety feels like something you have to earn.”

The Root Of Perfectionism

That strategy had roots much earlier in her life. As a teenager, Rooker says she experienced abuse within her family. As she writes in her book, when she told her mother, there was no intervention, no acknowledgment, and no offer of protection — leaving her feeling unsupported and unprotected. What she absorbed in that moment was devastatingly clear: she was on her own.

She adapted the way many traumatized children do: she split in two. One version of her kept going. The other stayed behind.

As a teenager, that split looked like the good girl the world could accept and the angry girl who had nowhere to go. As an adult, it became the accomplished woman everyone admired and the hidden self still carrying shame, grief, and pain that had never been fully faced.

From the outside, it read as ambition. Inside, it was armor.

Achievement became both propulsion and camouflage. She excelled academically, built a high-powered career, and learned how to hold it together in every room she entered. But the same perfectionism that won praise also contributed to disordered habits, persistent self-criticism, and an intense need for control.

“When you grow up feeling like you have to earn love, you get very good at earning things,” Rooker says. “You become the one who never falls apart, the one everyone calls strong.”

For a long time, that system worked well enough to keep her functional. Until it didn’t.

When Perfectionism Stopped Working

The turning point came when her mother grew terminally ill. By then, their relationship had stabilized, but only on the condition that the past remain untouched.

As her mother’s health declined, something began to surface that Rooker had spent years holding at a distance. Her mother’s death would close off the possibility of ever naming what had happened at fourteen — of having it acknowledged or understood.

When her mother died, that door closed.

The grief that followed was jagged. It was not only the loss of a parent. It was the loss of the conversation that would now never happen.

“For years, I told myself I’d moved on,” she says. “When my mom died, I realized I hadn’t healed. I had just become very good at functioning.”

The story she had told herself about strength began to fall apart. What had looked like discipline started to feel more like self-erasure. The identity she had built through control and achievement had reached its limit.

Grief, she discovered, does not negotiate with perfectionism. It simply arrives and asks for the one thing the perfectionist self has no protocol for: the willingness to come undone.

A New Door To Healing

As she searched for approaches that might complement traditional therapy, Rooker began exploring alternative healing methods, including work that allowed her to access deeper states of consciousness.

During one early guided experience, she describes encountering her mother again—this time without the defensiveness that had defined their life together. In that state, she experienced a sense of acknowledgment and apology that had never come in life. More than words, the experience gave Rooker access to something she had long been cut off from: self-compassion.

The moment did not solve the past. But it opened something she had kept sealed for decades.

What followed was slower, harder work: nervous system repair, trauma therapy, and deep self-inquiry. Through this work, she gradually dismantled patterns that had once helped her survive but no longer allowed her to live.

“Real healing isn’t a six-hour experience that rewrites your life,” she says. “It’s the quiet, repetitive labor of going to the source of the pain and not turning away.”

What Lies Beneath Perfection

Rooker began to see that perfectionism had never actually protected her. It had kept her striving, scanning, and disappearing.

“I realized I wasn’t flawed,” she says. “I had been surviving. Everything I did made sense in the environment I grew up in. But I wasn’t there anymore. And I could choose something else.”

That choice was not about fixing herself. It was about turning toward the girl she had spent a lifetime outrunning — the one who had carried the truth of what happened and waited for her to come back.

That shift became the foundation of her memoir, My Mother Is a Dragonfly. The book traces the long arc from silence to self-recognition, from high-functioning survival to something quieter and more durable: peace.

For most of her life, Rooker believed perfection would earn her love. What she came to understand was something else entirely.

She didn’t need to perfect herself or become someone different. The love she had been chasing was never out there. It was in turning toward herself — and staying.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not substitute for professional medical advice. If you are seeking medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, please consult a medical professional or healthcare provider.

BDG Media newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.