Perfectionism Has Entered The Chat

If you were given the label of a perfectionist, would you be happy?

Photo by Pierre Leverrier on Unsplash

For the longest time, perfectionism only had positive connotations for me. Reaching this status was laudable, and rare. Exactly the thing to set you apart if you were struggling in life.

I once tried to give myself that label, I can't quite remember exactly why now. I was onto something, and this was high school. The times to explore ourselves, and the times to care and be influenced by the opinions of others beyond measure.

A girl who kept her class notes extremely clean and tidy, and highlighted with a slew of different colours was talking about how she was a perfectionist about her notebooks. For a reason I can't recall now, I said I thought I was a perfectionist too. I was met with puzzled looks because my notebooks were anything but perfect. They were the embodiment of messines. My handwriting still is.

So my then malleable and impressionable brain thought oh ok, this idea must have been wrong. And we left it at that.

Fast forward 10 years, the topic of perfectionism has made its grand return.

The truth is, it has never left. I was just too unaware to notice. Now suddenly, it is the best-fitting explanation for all my struggles.

The biggest of those struggles was, I guess, that I wasn't really fond of myself.

I was so behind on everything I wanted to be, and I could find very few reasons to be happy with myself. Looking from the outside in, I didn't seem like the failure I felt.

My notebooks might have been messy, but I was a straight-A student. And so further on in life - I was picking some challenging goals and achieving a few of them. Looking from the outside in, I was quite ambitious and driven.

But this is because the others couldn't see all the things I failed as I could see them.

In the era of social media we find ourselves in, more and more reminders of showing the failures along with the successes spring up. And I can't agree with this more. The picture we portray is otherwise false.

But in the case of perfectionism, we do need to focus on success too.

It tends to get forgotten very quickly on our chase for the next goal. Or even worse, it never gets recognised because it is not as perfect as we've imagined it.

Digging for the source of my unhappiness is probably what led me to point the finger at perfectionism.

Some of my dreams came true, but I was still far from fulfilled. And growing out of my adolescent naivete, I knew I'd better address that or it would be another few (or a few dozen) years thrown to the wind.

At first, the only thing I could pinpoint was that I could almost never get anything done. And when I managed, it was with great effort and struggle.

And without bringing me the long-awaited fulfilment. As a prize for my success, I was getting feelings of guilt because it took me that long and because I was far behind the next thing on the list.

Having high expectations makes it hard to get anything done.

Yes, some of those high expectations might be ensuring the quality of what we are about to do, and earning us the desired exceptional praise.

Yet more often than not, they are the reason for our downfall and suffering. Deep down, we know we are extremely unlikely to reach the sky-high standards, so why should we even try?

From experience, we know we can never hit our internal success metrics. Avoiding the pain of failure then becomes the main focus of our subconscious. Thus through never trying things out, we inflict ourselves even greater failures.

"Everything in moderation", as the ancient Greeks have said, is the key thing here. As it seems to be in all walks of life.

Perfectionism is not all bad.

It is the fuel behind my ambitions, and I am happy when I achieve those goals (be it even too short-lived). But if we go too much to the extreme, we are bound to suffer.

We are imperfect beings, and this is where our charm is.

The people who truly love us don't have such incredibly high expectations of us.

So if we are to love ourselves, we should lower those expectations a bit and remember that a success is a success, even if it could have been done better.

Everything could always be better, the art of life is to realise when enough is enough.