The tyranny of perfectionism

Perfectionism is the bane of my life. Now that might sound a bit dramatic, but over the course of the next 1,500 words or so I am going to explain, potentially in a painful amount of detail, why this is actually a fair statement for me, and why, more broadly, I think we all need to change how we look at perfectionism, and see it for what it really is: a paralysing force.

Here’s an example to get us started - you see that paragraph above, all two or three sentences of it? Innocuous though it may look, said paragraph (if you can even call it that) went through about a dozen iterations in my head before appearing as it does here. Did I really want to start that second sentence with ‘now’? Should the comma in that second sentence have come before or after the ‘but’? Would ‘level’ of detail have worked better than ‘amount’? And so on and so forth. I even second-guessed the title of this piece multiple times - why not ‘curse’ or ‘scourge’ instead of ‘tyranny’? You get the idea.

I could, and probably will, share some other examples from my day-to-day life that aren’t related to writing, but this example is particularly relevant here (it also explains why I’m only just publishing this piece now, on the very last day of June, when it was due at the beginning). With this acknowledged, it probably goes without saying that my tendency towards perfectionism tends to slow me down - at its worst, however, it can paralyse me altogether, and even prevent me from getting started in the first place.

In my introductory piece, There doesn’t need to be a fire, I referred to my past self - or rather something I’d written at an earlier date in my morning pages - to shed more light on why I wanted to write a piece about depression. I am now going to do the same but for perfectionism, as I don’t think present me could give a better explanation than the one given by past me on Tuesday 2nd January this year. Two things to note beforehand: 1. this was, once again, not originally intended for public consumption; 2. as far as excerpts go…it’s pretty long.

“Being a perfectionist - perhaps because the word itself has the word ‘perfect’ within it - is often thought of as a positive thing. Or, if it’s presented as a negative, or a weakness, it’s still packaged up as a positive in disguise. Do I need to mention the whole, ‘well, I am a bit of a perfectionist!’ as a response to the interview question about one’s biggest perceived weakness/es, or can I assume you’re all familiar enough with it that I don’t have to? In any event, perfectionism isn’t a positive thing, and I say this as a card-carrying, not-out-of-choice perfectionist.

Perfectionism doesn’t just affect my ability to be creative, either - it cuts into all areas of my life, extending its nefarious tentacles so stealthily that I barely notice it happening. Perfectionism stops me from taking the time to apply make-up most days because, although I enjoy it and it unquestionably improves my mood, I’m never going to look as good as X, Y or Z anyway, so why even bother? Perfectionism stops me from getting in the car that I own and am legally permitted to drive, because, what if I make a stupid mistake? What if I cut a corner, or worse, someone gets angry at me for inconveniencing them? Better to just let it sit on the path.

Perfectionism stops me from running, or going to the gym, or going to most kinds of exercise class, because what if my time is terrible, my gait laughable, and/or I look like an idiot while doing it? What if I drop something heavy at the gym and am unable to ‘style it out’, or worse, injure myself in the process? What if, in a class, any class, I’m the uncoordinated dunce in the corner who is lagging behind everyone else, and isn’t even doing it right anyway? Better to just skip the run, let the gym membership go unused, and decide not to attend the class at the eleventh hour. Rinse and repeat this process for seemingly humdrum things like cooking and baking, too.”

So, present me promised a painful level of detail, and past me more than delivered! (There’s more perfectionism-related chat scattered throughout my morning pages, but I don’t think it is ever dealt with as explicitly or as coherently as it is in the passage above.) And I’d love to tell you that I’ve made noticeable progress over the six or so months since I wrote all of this, but, I haven’t. I’ve made a few baby steps here and there, sure, but the tyranny of perfectionism is a difficult thing to escape - especially when you’ve been in its grip for a long time.

As with anything like this, however, I am far, far from alone in experiencing it. In fact, I imagine a lot of people - and probably a lot of people I know - are also paralysed by perfectionism, but have no idea how to talk about it, because our understanding of perfectionism is so upside down. Julia Cameron, the multi-hyphenate creative and author of The Artist’s Way, offers the following definition of perfectionism:

“Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop - an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.”

Need I direct you back to the neuroses-filled second paragraph of this piece? If ever there was an example of getting so stuck in the details of what you are writing that you lose sight of the whole, that would be it. Further on in the same chapter of The Artist’s Way, Cameron adds “for the perfectionist, there are no first drafts, rough sketches, warm-up exercises. Every draft is meant to be final, perfect, set in stone”. She might as well be writing about me here, too, and this doesn’t apply only to creativity - I could extrapolate it to any number of things in my life.

This all keeps me, as in the actual physical being that exists out in the world, stuck, while the ‘me’ in my head just desperately wants to evolve, grow and move forward. The result of this is that I feel quite unhappy a lot of the time (if you’ve already read There doesn’t need to be a fire, then this probably isn’t news). But how do I go about breaking free of the tyranny of perfectionism? How does anyone?

As I’ve already touched upon, seeing perfectionism for what it really is and labelling it as such is likely a good place to start. I imagine you could hear (or rather read) the fear and anxiety laced through the words I wrote on Tuesday 2nd January. Indeed, realising that perfectionism often goes hand in hand with fear has been eye-opening for me. The writer Elizabeth Gilbert has a particularly compelling, and somewhat amusing, way of looking at this:

“They [people] wear their perfectionism like a badge of honour, as if it signals high tastes and exquisite standards. But I see it differently. I think perfectionism is just a high-end, haute couture version of fear. I think perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it’s just terrified.”

And where is the lie? (Also, as a lover of high-end things, it seems very on-brand for me to experience the high-end, haute couture version of fear specifically.) But, me and my expensive tastes aside, I’d be curious to hear how many other people are afflicted with this, how it affects their lives, and how they try to manage it.

Which brings me, tentatively, to an attempt to bring this piece to a close, and explain how I’m going to attempt to curb my perfectionistic tendencies going forward. While I don’t have any clear-cut answers - as much as I wish I did! - there is one key thing, or question, that I’m going to hold in mind when approaching pretty much anything I do from this point on:

Do I want to remain stuck, with all these ‘perfect’ things (body, face, portfolio of work, whatever) that exist only in my head? Or, do I want to have something imperfect but real, something that actually exists out in the world, to show for my efforts?

This might sound somewhat clunky or complicated on paper, but the idea behind it is quite simple. What would you rather have: a head full of ‘perfect’ hypotheticals, or a life of imperfect yet tangible progress? And although the answer might be obvious to many of you reading this - I know a number of self-confessed ‘done-ists’ and ‘enough-ists’ who are probably perplexed as to why anyone would choose the former - I’m sure there are many others, like me, who need all the help they can get in trying to progress to the latter.

I’m sure I’ll be following this up at some point in the not-terribly-distant future, but for now, I will leave you with a final statement on perfectionism from Julia Cameron (another insight of hers that I’ll be holding onto going forward):

“Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough - that we should try again.

No. We should not.”