028: On Recovering from Perfectionism
It’s not as simple as they promised
Hi friends,
I’m in San Francisco this weekend, and once again I’ve managed to write my newsletter in advance! I always impress myself when I actually do this, instead of scrambling to try to publish something written on my phone. Please clap. (Or just like the post below.)
Thank you to everyone who gave me a lot of good feedback over the last two weeks on the new tiered subscriptions for this Substack. Based on some feedback I did lower the monthly and annual rates to $5/month and $50/year. The 25% discount is still available until May 16! I’m also going to try to introduce some other benefits for subscribers, I’m just trying to come up with what those look like.
Ironically, this launch and the feedback I got really has me thinking about something else I spent most of my twenties dealing with: Perfectionism. I consider myself a ‘recovering perfectionist,’ and the past couple of months have been a hard hit to that recovery. So... yeah, that’s what I want to write about this week.
If you enjoy reading this post, tap on that little heart at the bottom and let me know!
For about three months now, a little part of me has been watching the way we’re emerging from the pandemic with trepidation. Not that everyone has been emerging at the same rate—Texas and Florida come to mind as places that never seemed to really go into lockdown to begin with. LA is on the other side, a city that seems to suddenly be coming back to life after 13 months of lockdown (but which struggled with containment throughout the pandemic due to underground clubs and people privately still seeing each other). The trepidation isn’t from worrying about a resurgence in cases. Instead, this is making me nervous because some people have been treating this time like they’re emerging from a chrysalis. They’re newly fit, they have new hobbies, they created new businesses—they’re new people, a clear delineation between pre-lockdown and post-lockdown, a time when they stepped away and recreated themselves.
This isn’t everyone, of course, and I’ve been pretty careful to fill my feed with people who are decidedly not performing improvement like this. But seeing the people who are is making me feel like I somehow did the lockdown “wrong.” Even though I know I did it as scientifically correct as I financially could have (I eventually had to get a job in a place with people, I just had to), I followed every medical recommendation to get locking down “right.” And yet… I’m not emerging butterfly-like from a cocoon of self-improvement and self-righteousness, so now I feel like I did lockdown “wrong.”
On the other hand, I’m sure some people can look at me and see me as one of the chrysalis people. I started this newsletter in late February 2020, and since then it’s brought huge change into my life. I finished writing a novel during the pandemic, even though it will never see the light of day. I began my Patreon in July and that’s freed me up financially to focus on my research a tiny bit more than I was before. I’m definitely less physically fit than I was pre-pandemic, but I did help launch a non-profit that I now work for full-time-ish. I turned 30 and my anxiety has dropped a lot. Big changes were wrought.
But I don’t look different (except my longer hair) and the things that feel different about myself aren’t really easy to show off on Instagram. It’s all hitting right in the part of me that used to be a perfectionist.
I call myself a recovering perfectionist not to downplay addiction but because trying to cut those habits out of my life does feel like recovery and backsliding. It can feel like a compulsion that rears its head suddenly, a strange internal demand that something must be perfect to be worthy of anything. Like any drug or alcohol addiction, my perfectionism has triggers that make it worse, like when I’m looking too closely at a friend’s book deal or seeing how physically fit another friend got from their Peloton in their living room. I have to talk myself down from it, and I have friends that I rely on to help me when the usual outlets don’t work.
Not that I’m the first person to link perfectionism and addiction. There’s a ton of science around this: The dangers of perfectionism in early recovery, how perfectionism shows up in recovery, the hidden link between addiction and perfectionism, the perils of perfectionism… There’s truly a lot of science out there linking the two behaviors because they stem from a lot of the same issues: overly critical thinking, attempting to fix or avoid past traumas in the present, and a deep desire for approval and acceptance.
I glomped on to perfectionism probably in elementary school—though I did try to write ‘college’ then ‘high school’ then ‘middle school’ before finally realizing just how far back it went. I think, for me, it started in fourth grade, which is when I switched from private school to public school and found myself facing a completely different set of social values from my peers. Where kids at my Montessori school hadn’t been concerned with status symbols like clothes and looks and school supplies, at my public elementary school those things absolutely mattered. Before I knew what was happening, I was a social outcast, bullied by a girl named Sara who I will never forget until the day I die. (It took everything in my power not to call her a bitch here. Help, I’m still not fully healed!)
However, when the school year wore on and I got good grades and turned out to be kind of nice, it redeemed me in the eyes of some of my peers. Enough of them wanted help with their homework or to borrow a book from me that my social standing rose enough that I wasn’t a total outcast. Sara eventually just left me alone, mostly because the other kids stopped laughing when she picked on me, and I was able to move through the rest of my K-12 education more or less invisible to my classmates. (Which really, looking back, is probably the best case scenario.)
At the time, I was too young to see the larger ecosystem of that elementary school. I couldn’t see why Sara was bullying me (all bullies go through something), and I couldn’t see how the approval from other kids disempowered her… All I could see was that getting good grades and being nice was making me not be bullied, so I strove to be absolutely perfect in my friendships and my schoolwork (except in high school, ironically, when it mattered). I was always really critical of myself when I did something wrong, replaying mistakes in my head for weeks (months, years). I made myself anxious and gave myself ulcers worrying over every gesture I made, every word I said, every phrase I wrote. I was rarely late with schoolwork because deadlines were also very important, but turning in something that was less than perfect because I’d come up against the deadline was something I’d beat myself up over for long periods time.
Meanwhile, side projects that I wanted to do I would ignore or put off because I couldn’t get them perfect. I would find reasons to quit doing something, usually because I’d already missed a day or made a mistake, and suddenly it wasn’t “worth it” to do it anymore. I wouldn’t go to the gym for four or five days because I missed a day early that week; I wouldn’t eat healthy because I’d had unhealthy food the day before. If I ate one cookie I’d just eat ten. Any little mistake was a reason to simply give up—I had ~tainted it~ with my imperfection.
Did other people see this in me? Absolutely. Did they try to help? Of course. Were they helpful? Not really. Because a lot of the advice I got was along the line of, “Just stop worrying about it!” Or maybe, “But is it really the end of the world if you don’t do x perfectly?” My brain would explode into exclamation points and flashing lights at these sentences. “Oh okay, let me just TURN OFF a fundamental part of my personality, brb!” Or maybe, “I don’t know, it could be the end of the world if I screw up! It sure feels like the end of the world!”
All of that advice might have worked for the symptoms but not the cause. People were well-intentioned, but they didn’t know how deep it ran, really.
I actually started to get better in my early twenties. Nicole Antoinette wrote several times (and still writes a lot) about how perfectionism is the enemy of good. “Done is better than perfect,” became a mantra for me after something she said. It helped a lot. For years, I got more done. There have been triggers now and then—I turned in my Master’s thesis several hours late because I was trying to make it perfect (and didn’t succeed). But I finally finished writing a novel after a decade spent trying to make it perfect. I wrote screenplays with no idea what I was doing, something that was unfathomable of to me as a teen. I embraced and even delighted in doing things that I was bad at, like bowling, just because it was fun. I started work out streaks and then restarted them and restarted them and restarted them. 95% of the time I felt fine about the little mistakes I made. And when I didn’t feel fine about it? “Done is better than perfect!” I’d chant. “Perfectionism is the enemy of good!” I’d remind myself.
And then, suddenly, this month has been really rough. On April 2, I was on day 92 of my writing streak on 750words.com when I accidentally missed the day because I just didn’t hit save in time. I have been angry with myself about it all month. And I’ve also been careless with the rest of the writing days this month—I’ve missed two more days since, and each time my brain inevitably whispers, “Well, you already missed a day, what’s one more?” I’ve felt disinterested in writing since messing up the streak, and have found myself just typing pointless nonsense into the field instead of using it as a meaningful writing time, which is what I did do for 92 days.
Meanwhile, I’ve been watching people on Instagram emerge from their chrysalises and thinking to myself, “Fuck, I have nothing to ‘show’ for this time. The things I have started aren’t ‘finished’ AND the things I have finished I can’t share AND certainly, none of it is perfect.” Now the weird perfectionist habits are creeping back in—I didn’t wake up on time so I might as well sleep later than I even want to; the living room is a mess, so why bother cleaning the kitchen? I’m backsliding.
It’s strange to be able to experience this first-hand and also watch it happen as if it’s to someone else. I’m so entrenched in my non-perfectionist habits that I can see the cracks and flaws in that perfectionist thinking, but the thoughts come up and seem to dominate anyway. It feels suddenly very dramatic to be feeling this way, yet I can’t stop myself. All I can do is accept it as it comes and try not to let it take over and win. Some days are much easier than others.
There are a lot of inspirational sayings for recovery. I usually find them kind of trite, but I like the focus on the present moment and then the future that a lot of them contain. ‘The first step in recovery is deciding that you're not going to stay where you are.’ ‘You have to accept that your life isn’t working as it is and that there is a better way, then try to get there.’ Most importantly, for me, I try to remember that I’m not defined by the times I let perfectionism win, but by the times I kept getting better despite those moments. And I try to just let myself be.
Currently Reading
Part of my research for my Patreon has been reading the very first academic look at fanzines from the 1970s. It has been a bit frustrating to read (what, women weren’t fans of anything, ever?) but there is also a lot of interesting contextualization to how fans communicated and operated before the internet. It’s a product of its time, but I’ve enjoyed it so far. This is an excerpt from the book review I wrote for my Patreon supporters:
Wertham's analysis of zines is certainly what I expected from the very first academic study of this subset of society. He takes long tangents to explain how zines pop up and publish irregularly, how they suddenly disappear after one issue or a thousand. He is concerned, primarily, with making sure we all understand that fanzine production differs from commercial magazine production. Wertham takes whole chapters to explain what types of things zine writers write about, what they concern themselves with: picking apart the science of a novel, theorizing about what might come next, discussing what happened in the most recent book in a saga, etc. In a world where every person in the US had theories about Game of Thrones and talked about it endlessly, it's surreal to have the basics of fandom introduced as if the concept might be foreign. My favorite part of his take though is how pure he finds all of this. Occasionally I can feel his delight through the decades, his happy surprise at having found all these people, these adults, who do something just because they love it.
I don’t necessarily recommend the book to anyone; I’m not sure what anyone else would get out of it. But, it gave me a lot to consider. And I keep meaning to write about fandom someday. Maybe I finally will next time.
You can read more of this book review and all my other research on my Patreon!
Internet Things I Read and Loved This Month
And now for the irregularly kept list of things that I read on the Internet that I thought were excellent this month:
How Friends predicted the culture of mistrust at work through Chandler Bing’s job, from The Atlantic
Catherine of Sienna: Being Weird and Bothering the Pope, by Brittany Muller
How Do We Make Food Access a Right, Not A Privilege? from SOURCED
A Relationship Won’t Fix Me, by John Paul Brammer
The Death of a Cat, by Lyz Lenz
I Regret to Inform You That I Have Once Again Written About the Baylor Influencer Twins, by Anne Helen Petersen
I Can’t Stop Cringing At My Old Self, by John Paul Brammer
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All the best, friends!
Valorie