Death to Perfectionism

When did perfectionism become so desirable?

I’ve noticed that since the rise of ‘hustle and grind’ in popular culture over the past few years, there’s been an uptick in people identifying as perfectionists.

People stacking up cookies in glass jars with the chocolate end facing the same way on Instagram, or giggling about fronting tins of beans in the cupboard. “I’m such a perfectionist!” they trill. ‘Perfectionist’ has become a byword for being a competitive, work-hard, type A, productivity-obsessed personality trope. For some, it seems to have replaced a personality altogether.

How did we make the switch from perfectionism being a limiter that needs to be carefully managed, towards it becoming a signifier of high status?

I think the glorification of wealth and celebrity has something to do with it.

Read about Serena Williams or Beyonce working since they were five years old, critiquing videos of their own performances and micromanaging every aspect of their professional lives, and then try to feel that your level of ordinary effort is okay. We’re normalising obsessing over work and status, way beyond sufficiency.

Anyway, liking things done a certain way or working hard isn’t perfectionism. There's nothing wrong with being particular. But let me tell you from first-hand experience that perfectionism is not something you want to cultivate.

When I was young, primary school age, (and this’ll shock you) I could be extraordinarily difficult to manage.

At school, I was a model student: nothing less was acceptable in a formal Catholic education. I was the ultimate goody two-shoes. I got picked for everything because I was keen, hardworking and trustworthy. You can probably already tell where this is going. Elsewhere, I was anything but. Outside the confinement of school, the valve would blow and all that pressure would be released like mustard gas. Public tantrums and breakdowns were frequent and I had a knack for picking the most inviolable public spaces to embarrass everyone. The library. Sunday Mass. The middle of the main road that ran through the town. I would totally melt down at the slightest inconvenience.

After one particularly extra scene in my parents’ taxi office, my dad picked me up, carried me down the steps into the car and grimly drove us home while I slapped and thrashed, like a mullet fish caught in a low tide. Reaching the house, he ported me up the stairs into my bedroom and dumped me heavily onto the bed, slamming the door shut and holding it fast from the other side. I began to hammer on the door, kicking heavily at the wood. Did I mention I was wearing tap shoes at the time? In a moment of low comedy, the steel toe of the shoe kicked a hole clean through the door. The hole was roughly puttied over but remains visible to this day, over thirty years later.

My mother was at her wit’s end. Often, she was the target of my worst outbursts, owing to our closeness. (Zero consolation, then or now.) She made an appointment at our local doctor’s surgery, and presented me helplessly for an assessment. I remember nothing about it but the ‘diagnosis’ was that I was a bright child who displayed perfectionist tendencies, and was not possessed of the emotional maturity to manage either. When things didn’t go the way I wanted them to, I simply couldn’t cope. The recommended course of action was to move me up a year in school, in the hope that an intellectual stretch may bring some emotional relief for everyone. My mother decided against it, fearing that I would sink alongside the older and more mature girls.

I think she was right. In fact, this advice sounds ridiculous to me now. It’s up there with recommending tennis lessons for the depressed. What I needed was help managing my emotions and the accompanying shame. The outcome was that I stayed where I was but the tantrums mysteriously melted away. Even I had a sense that things had gone too far this time.

As the years went by and my sense of social awareness grew, the public freakouts stopped. But I had no real coping mechanisms for the maelstrom within, which remains a mystery even to me. Why was I possessed of such emotional intensity? I still don’t know.

All I succeeded in doing was driving things deeper. As my shame grew, I internalised.

I developed a habit of counting syllables inside my head when anyone spoke to me. Phrases resulting in an even number of syllables were good; odds were bad. I spent many, many years in the grip of a compulsion to pull out my own eyelashes. I’m still an uncontrollable skin picker and have to deliberately and decidedly prevent myself from doing either, with limited success at times. I’ve never had any type of therapeutic intervention but I imagine I’ve earned my place on the obsessive/compulsive scale - and not in a cute way.

Did my perfectionist tendencies drive these habits, triangulating the internal turmoil onto my own person, or did my natural intensity attempt to control itself with rigid perfectionism, to dominate the outer world? Probably both.

Artist Nicholas Wilton wrote:

“It is our nature to be imperfect. To have uncategorized feelings and emotions. To make or do things that don’t necessarily make sense. Art is all just perfectly imperfect.”

I wish someone in my life could have shown me those words at that time, but they couldn’t, because none of us knew. Everybody was concerned and kindly but couldn't really help, because we hadn’t been taught how to process our feelings, all of our feelings, even the nasty ones, and not to hold on to all the fuck ups.

These days, in my typically contrary way, just as perfectionism reaches the height of its popularity, I reject it in all its forms. In fact, I want to retire the concept of perfect, or even 'embracing imperfection’. Defining it as what is not, is still giving it life. It is no one’s natural condition to be flawless and wanting that not to be so is going to kill us all.

I’ve definitely mellowed out. Age and children will do that to you. But I still have work to do. I recoiled rewatching my son’s third birthday video; as he goes to blow out the candles, my hand appears in shot to fix his hair. Practically every day my husband implores me to just take things a little easier on myself and everyone else. Because that’s the worst thing about perfectionism. It affects everyone, and if you can’t be kind and forgiving of yourself, you can’t understand how to be kind and forgiving of others.

Take it from a lifetime of experience that a crumbless kitchen or perfect CV or impeccable kids are not standards to strive for; they are symptoms of a lack of compassion for yourself and others, and a dysfunctional view of what a worthy life looks like.

Forgive yourself. Let go of perfect, because it isn’t real and it never was. But you are, with all your hangups and cockups and everything else.

Let’s meet again, as our true selves. Become the happy mess that you were always supposed to be.