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February 7 - February 18, 2025
So how do you set yourself free, or even begin to understand what freedom looks like for you? You start by being honest with yourself about who you are.
You admit that you’d never be satisfied with an average life—you long to excel, and you know it. You acknowledge just how much you thrive by being pushed—you need a challenge or your boredom risks tipping over into a depressive episode.
We both know that in the past, your perfectionism has tortured you in every arena of life: professionally, romantically, artistically, physically, spiritually.
You couldn’t get rid of your perfectionism if you tried (and try you did) because it’s a fundamental component of who you are.
the deepest, most powerful parts of who you are never abandon you.
Perfectionists are intelligent people who understand that everything can’t work out perfectly all the time. What they sometimes have trouble with is understanding why they still feel so disappointed by imperfection in the face of that intellectual concession. What they sometimes wonder about is why they feel so compelled to endlessly strive. What they’re sometimes confused by is what they’re striving for in the first place. What they often question is why they can’t just enjoy relaxing “like a normal person.” What they want to know is who they are outside of what they accomplish.
Most people harbor a private suspicion that they’re worse off than even they themselves know. Like, it’s bad.
Perfectionism does not have to be a struggle. You do not have to stop being a perfectionist to be healthy.
No. It’s important to me that people feel I’m easy to connect with, so I try my best to avoid behaviors that may be off-putting to others.
Going on a vacation with no itinerary.
I’m reliable, highly organized, and I love planning. I sometimes get the sense that other people experience me as “uptight.”
Engendering meaningful connections with others.
I consider it somewhat offensive when people make adjustments to the structure and timeline of anything (a meeting, a dinner, a vacation, etc.). We should be able to make one plan and stick to it.
Being mean, “intense,” or intimidating.
When another person works to understand who I am as a person and why what matters to me matters to me.
Classic perfectionists are highly reliable, consistent, and detail-oriented, and they add stability to their environment. Left unchecked, they struggle to adapt to spontaneity or a change in routine, and they can experience difficulty connecting meaningfully with others.
Parisian perfectionists possess a live-wire understanding of the power of interpersonal connection and hold a strong capacity for empathy. Left unchecked, their desire to connect to others can metastasize into toxic people-pleasing.
ouch
no one can hide their suffering better than the highly functioning person.
still—I never realized how attached I was to control until I started to lose so much of it.
Highly self-disciplined, classic perfectionists are adept at presenting in a uniform way, making it difficult to take their emotional temperature. Are they thrilled? Enraged?
While it’s easy to interpret this engagement style as inauthentic or closed off, it’s anything but.
Classic perfectionists can be experienced by others as unapproachable or haughty, but the order this type builds around themselves is about reverence, not creating a wall.
For example, a classic perfectionist might say, “I don’t like drinking because I don’t like feeling out of control.”
woah hey now
classic perfectionists have difficulty adjusting to schedule changes, big or small, and they tend to experience spontaneity as stressful.
heavy on the schedule change
Parisian perfectionists want to be perfectly liked, an “achievement” other types of perfectionists don’t prize. Even when everything else is going exactly the way they’d choose, when a Parisian perfectionist is experiencing difficulty connecting to someone with whom they want to connect, it can all feel for naught.
creating a loathsome experience of self-infantilization wherein the perfectionist feels like a needy child vying for attention and approval.
woah stop
Why risk sharing your dreams with people unless you’re certain they’ll come true?
but they’re secretly waiting for approval around every corner—they want the laughs at the party, the likes on their feed, and the compliments on their work.
Parisian perfectionists invest a great deal of emotional energy into everything they do; they want a commensurate emotional return on their investment (i.e., validation and connection) and can be left hurt and angry if they don’t get it.
Parisian perfectionists who haven’t yet discovered how to manage their perfectionism fail to articulate what they need or want.
Parisian perfectionists are driven by a desire to connect meaningfully with others.
Because interpersonal connection is paramount to them, Parisian perfectionists are genuinely warm people who want everyone they encounter to feel included and connected.
Procrastinator perfectionists wait for the conditions to be perfect before starting. Dwelling in hesitation, they live alongside the void that forms within you when you don’t do the thing you most want to do.
are able to get something going, they can find it difficult to continue because continuing involves restarting.
they may abandon opportunities that require a longer runway because committing to any long-term process involves stopping and starting over several times.
The more self-aware a procrastinator perfectionist is, the more frustrated with themselves they are.
Avoiding loss is perhaps the most natural emotional reflex there is, hence why the habit of hesitation is so powerful for this type.
Procrastinator perfectionists who aren’t managing their perfectionism become self-loathing and critical.
It was something adjacent to mania, the way her mind flooded with ideas about how to improve, solve, create. The volume of possibilities she generated was astounding,
Messy perfectionists are in love with starting.
Anger is a powerful, healthy, necessary, and motivating force. Dysfunction arises when you use your anger to hurt yourself or others, which intense perfectionists tend to do (consciously or not).
If an intense perfectionist sets a goal that isn’t reached, or isn’t reached in the perfect manner they envisioned, they consider the entire endeavor a failure.
Unless they hit their goal, it was all for nothing.
We think that if we could just figure out how to get rid of our perfectionism, as all the self-help books instruct us to do, every single layer of our lives would be improved.
Managing perfectionism by telling perfectionists to stop being perfectionists is like managing anger by telling people to “calm down.”
Perfectionism is meant to be managed, not destroyed.
Ambition is not a universal trait. Some people are not interested in continually pushing themselves towards their highest potential or chasing an ideal.
Perfectionists have trouble relating to people who don’t hold a strong impulse towards perfectionism, and vice versa.
Like every identity structure, being a perfectionist operates on a continuum.
Illness models are also based on atomism, which supports the idea that the source of what’s wrong can be traced down to one thing.
