The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

by Katherine Morgan Schafler

When you approach your health holistically, you’re not just trying to find one wrong thing and fix it, you’re working to strengthen each part of yourself so that you can become healthier overall.

Not everyone gets to experience that impulse you carry, pushing you to explore the bounds of possibility for yourself and the world around you. Perfectionists don’t allow themselves to be constrained by what’s “realistic”; that one mindset advantage alone is invaluable.

With the same ease that you so willingly accept the veracity of “experts” who are constantly telling you that you’re fucked up in some way, entertain the idea that you’re not.

Boldness, authenticity, an endless drive you don’t even have to try to cultivate, the confidence to fail, learn, and grow as you saturate your life with more and more meaning and improve yourself and the world around you—that’s perfectionism. You can resist perfectionism or you can embrace it.

In addition to balancing tasks, women are also expected to preemptively balance other people’s emotional experience of them.

“Being a man” calls for a blankness that doesn’t fit the rich sensitivity, humor, creative power, abiding compassion, intelligence, and beauty of men. Anyone who’s raising a little boy will tell you that this one is the sweetest boy who ever existed. All that kindness, affection, and curiosity that so readily bursts out of little boys’ hearts is exactly what men are taught to smother if they want to be taken seriously in the world.

Do not allow your ambition to be pathologized. Refuse to apologize for or disguise your insatiable desire to excel. Reject entirely the notion that you need to be fixed. Reclaim your perfectionism now. If only for the briefest moment, allow yourself to consider a radical thought in a misogynist world: there’s nothing wrong with you.

The trick is to figure out how to excel based on your values, not someone else’s values.

You don’t earn your way to joy. Joy is a birthright. So is love, freedom, dignity, and connection.

The other major misunderstanding we have about self-worth is that it’s static. Self-worth is fluid. Even the most self-assured among us aren’t inoculated when it comes to becoming untethered from their self-worth. The breakaway can happen in an instant.

The more you’ve established a connection to your self-worth, the more easily you can realign yourself when you lose your footing, but we all lose our footing.

Derailing from your center can happen in a blink—when everyone in the meeting laughs, and you’re not sure if it’s with you or at you; when your credit card is declined at the grocery store; when you see something you weren’t expecting to see on social media; when someone you’re dating or building a new friendship with stops texting you back. Self-worth is fluid because all mental health is fluid.

Nobody is inoculated from “mental health conditions”; mental health conditions are human conditions. We all have the capacity to dip, dive, coast, float, and soar. We’re all up and down at different times, in different ways, and for different reasons. This is all fine and as it should be; it’s also exactly why we need one another.

Your memories of perfect moments are memories of moments in which you were most present.

Presence changes how judgmental, compassionate, and solution-oriented you are. Being present invites relief from living in a world where what’s missing and wrong relentlessly eclipses what’s good and already there.

It’s not a coincidence that the people who rise and remain at the top of their fields are the ones who feel present doing what they’re doing.

When someone asks me what I do, I want to feel excited to discuss it. I don’t need to feel thrilled to jump out of bed and go to work every single day, but I do want to feel an overall sense of pride in my work. I want the hard days to not feel like a direct threat to my mental health. I want the feeling of forcing myself to do my job to be gone. I don’t need to feel at ease all the time, but I want to feel comfortable enough to laugh a few times a week at work.

Connection is the source of all growth and healing. Connection is a need. In the absence of healthy connections, we become dysfunctional.

When you’re in a positive state, your thoughts about the possible actions you can take expand; you realize you can do a lot of different things, and you make choices that promote future positive states. For example, if you feel happy, you’re more likely to plan, say, a Sunday morning hike with friends next week. Because you enjoyed the hike, you’re more likely to go home and enjoy your evening. Energized by your good mood, you decide to cook while listening to music. You make something healthy-ish for dinner, then go to bed on the early side—decisions that make you feel restored the next morning.

When your thought-action repertoire is narrowed, it’s harder to see around the problem. For example, if you feel bad because you got a negative performance review, you probably won’t feel inspired to take on the night. You’re more likely to think, Well, nothing left to do but go home, order some food, and call it a day. You watch TV for three hours after eating a junky dinner that makes you feel bloated and gross, and now it’s 1:00 a.m. And you hate that it’s 1:00 a.m. because you meant to go to bed early. Your negativity is compounding. You get anxious about feeling worse and then you can’t sleep. In the morning you feel worn down because of your sleepless night. At that point, you’re not thinking, How do I seize this day!? You’re thinking, How do I get through this day!? When your thought-action repertoire is narrowed, your perspective is stunted; you can only see ten or twenty minutes in front of you. How do you broaden your thought-action repertoire? With self-compassion.