I’m about 10 years old. Maybe even younger.
My mother is pleading with me that my school uniform skirt is absolutely adequate and I shouldn’t waste my precious energy re-ironing its many pleats to perfection. My body fills with panic, urgency and desperation, which transcends into my voice as I brush her off, insisting that it did have to be perfect, frustrated that she couldn’t understand how absolutely important it was.
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My mother didn’t teach me to be a perfectionist. I mean, she certainly never was one.
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In fact, I felt much more at ease with my aunt, her sister-in-law, who was a perfectionist like me — in her housekeeping, her kitchen, her insane attention to detail and her burning annoyance at everyone who so much as scratched a perfect whitewashed wall as they brushed past it carelessly. She understood what I felt, she spoke my language. I felt safe with her.
For a long time, I believed a story about how it was my father’s anger at my mother for not taking enough care with the details that mattered to him that led me into a lifelong harrowing career in perfectionism. Out of fear of the same anger being unleashed upon me.
But then, I realised it wasn’t the true source at all. I wasn’t scared of someone else’s anger. I was scared of something inside myself. After all the therapy and healing sessions with all manner of practitioners and philosophies that I’ve invested in, it finally came to me in the middle of a conversation about perfectionism — I was scared of not knowing how to deal with the mental and emotional overwhelm that chaos caused inside of me. And perfectionism was the way out. A creation of the illusion of control.
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Perfectionism is a way of creating safety, comfort and predictability in a world that is chaotic and overwhelming. It’s not a solution, or even a virtue — it’s a bandaid to deal with a deeper, underlying problem.
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Perfectionism is not even a way of securing affection and attention, as I once believed — though that is a pleasant side effect of being obsessively detail-oriented in a messy world. While I don’t doubt many of us suffer from a lack of self worth and desired more attention from our poor working class parents, and while the world we live in regularly rewards those who can work like machines, these rewards are just byproducts. Just like intense exercise has the pleasant side effect of making you more physically fit and attractive. Yet that's not why we get addicted to it.
We get addicted to the feeling of control. Not control of the world around us, no — but the one inside us.
Perfectionism is a way of sterilising our environment of unmanageable elements. Of dealing with things that we don’t have the tools to deal with.
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It’s a way of putting the monsters safely away inside the closet, under the bed, out of sight and hopefully also, out of mind.
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And anything else we do to control these monsters we don’t want to deal with, be it exercise, meditation, travel, eating, socialising, or even netflixing, is a way of avoiding dealing with the real problem. I’d even propose that the most determined of perfectionists are those with the highest emotionality, safely hidden away in the closet.
It’s not our fault that we don’t want to deal with the underlying emotions.
First and foremost, most of us were never taught any tools to deal with them, to face them and accept them. We were rather taught to put them away, to not let them be seen, to not cry or scream, to hide away our tears and our tempers.
And then, we’ve grown up in a world that rewards those who show no emotion, and even better, those who help us avoid our emotions too. Products, politicians, professional positions — the very word “professional” has sneakingly come to mean “with complete predictability and zero emotionality.” A world where “professional” armour in the form of suits that make us look less human and more reliable is valued above showing our skin, our vulnerability, our humanity. The more “perfect” and orderly and predictably safe a product or politician is, the more monetary value we are willing to attach to it. We pay people most to be like robots, or to provide us with robots.
In fact, those who work to bring us in contact with our emotions — artists, musicians, poets, theatre makers — are systematically un-rewarded, as if to create a symbol of societal suffering bestowed upon anyone who dares to bring emotions to the surface.
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It’s clear in the world we live in: daring to handle emotions out in the open will leave you rejected, abandoned, undervalued, and maybe even labelled an uncivilised failure in life and society.
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However, as anyone who has tried to disarm their perfectionism and discard their material armour might tell you, it’s not just us that’s afraid of our emotions — after generations of being hidden away in the closet, our emotions might be just as afraid of being seen.
Have we ever really paused to consider why the monsters hide in the dark, in the closet, under the bed — why they hide at all, if they are monsters to be feared? Perhaps we are the ones to be feared — the ones who shun anything that is less than perfect, that doesn’t fit our ideal of beauty and desire enough to be seen with in public (or even in private, for that matter).
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Perhaps our perfectionism is an armour so convincing and intimidating that even the scary monsters are hiding away out of fear of being rejected, abandoned, and resigned to a life of being silenced and unseen.
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When I finally wanted to get in touch with my voice, my emotions, to finally look at the monsters in my closet — I couldn’t even find them. The closet had been bricked over, plastered and painted as if there never had been a closet at all. And within it sat those cold, suffering, lonely, abandoned parts of me that had turned ugly from being hidden away in the dark, without fresh air or sunshine, without love or friendship — the parts of me that I had hidden away as a child because I was too overwhelmed by them in an external environment that didn’t give me the space nor the tools to feel safe in staying friends with them.
I was too afraid of being rejected and abandoned if I let these parts of me be seen, because they didn’t just overwhelm me, they overwhelmed everyone around me, even those who were supposed to keep me safe and secure — parents, teachers, friends, cousins.
And when I finally broke down the wall and opened the closet, it wasn’t the monsters that were scary but my own beliefs about them — the overwhelm that I had come to associate with them.
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How cliché it is to “think out of the box” — and how ironic, when so many of us have spent our entire lives putting all of ourselves into a neat little box, for the sake of those around us, to please our parents and bosses, to not force them to deal with our vulnerabilities and insecurities.
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How ironic too that I ended up in a creative profession, while having been all my life caught up with being a perfectionist just so I could deal with the overwhelm of all I felt in reaction to the world around me.
Perfectionism is the box that we need to think outside of, because humans are not born in a box, and can never thrive in a box. The only way we can really reach our potential is by breaking free of the boxes and fences we’ve built around ourselves to keep us in the illusion of safety.
It’s an illusion to be safe from death or depression. It’s like trying to be safe from life. The only way to live is to accept death, loss, fear and disappointment. To accept our vulnerability as human beings. To stop being perfectionists and start being our messy organic misshapen selves.
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Perfectionism is an artificially created disease of constant doing. A delusion that we as humans have a godlike purpose to create a world that doesn’t already exist. An obsessive belief that we are here to fix something that isn’t broken.
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Perfection already exists in nature. And it requires us to do absolutely nothing. To stand still and become aware of the movement of the universe around us. To realise the beauty of being able to hear the blood rushing in our own veins, of seeing leaves drifting down to the ground, of feeling that burst of warmth in our chest when we see the innocent vulnerability of young life, of being able to feel and touch and smell this magical world that we get to experience in every single moment — that is perfection.
And the only way we can learn to live in perfection is by learning to be still and do nothing to interrupt the beauty that is already around us. The question is, do we dare?
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