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August 8, 2023 - March 17, 2024
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.
Procrastinator perfectionists excel at preparing, can see opportunities from a 360-degree perspective, and have good impulse control. Left unchecked, their preparative measures hit a point of diminishing returns, resulting in indecisiveness and inaction. Messy perfectionists effortlessly push through the anxiety of new beginnings, are superstar idea generators, adapt to spontaneity well, and are naturally enthusiastic. Left unchecked, they struggle to stay focused on their goals, ultimately spreading their energy too thin to follow through on their commitments.
(and there’s no better first sentence than the one a procrastinator perfectionist imagines in her head but never actually writes down).
A messy perfectionist writes the first sentence, loves it, and then writes seventeen other, very different versions of the first sentence and loves each one of those and couldn’t possibly pick just one because you can’t have a favorite child, and those are all her sentence babies.
Perfectionists are people who consistently notice the difference between an ideal and a reality, and who strive to maintain a high degree of personal accountability.
Then she sat in the exact same place on the couch that she sat in every week, but that’s not a classic perfectionist thing; everyone does that.
Parisian perfectionists want to be perfectly liked, an “achievement” other types of perfectionists don’t prize.
Why risk sharing your dreams with people unless you’re certain they’ll come true?
“I’m not trying that hard because I don’t need your approval and I don’t care if you like me”—the subtext of the message being, “You can’t hurt me.”
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.
The problem for these perfectionists is that starting a process taints it—now that it’s real, it can no longer be perfect. If something is perfect to them, it exists only in past memory or future ideal.
Persisting across time and cultures, the universal desire to actualize the ideals we imagine is as healthy as the impulse to love, to solve problems, to make art, to kiss, to tell stories, and so on.
Nowhere is our reactive instead of proactive model of care more apparent than in the stupefying fact that you currently need to be diagnosed with a mental health disorder to receive insurance reimbursement for mental health counseling. That’s like needing to have the flu before you’re allowed to wash your hands.
The more you learn to manage your perfectionism, however, the less you’re overwhelmed by it.
The general sentiment goes something like, “I know I’ll never be happy-happy, but I’d like to be less unhappy.”
She also didn’t like dating at all. “At all” as in she hated it. “At all” as in she wondered if she might be asexual.
In 2011, Japanese organizing consultant Marie Kondo wrote The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. My poor friends. For so long, I would not stop talking about this book.
No matter what the artist does, no matter how much they achieve in other areas of their life, they’ll feel like a loser until they make some art. This can’t be helped. It shouldn’t be helped.
The trick is to figure out how to excel based on your values, not someone else’s values.
All perfectionists have vocal inner critics.
Your work is to examine the degree to which your thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and interpersonal relationships are disrupting or enhancing your quality of life.
Adaptive perfectionists find it to be an honor and a privilege to have discovered an endeavor worthy of endless pursuit.
The reward of doing work you know you can never finish is that you get to continue to do the work.
As the ever-brilliant Dr. Brené Brown succinctly explains, “We think self-esteem”; self-esteem is not a feeling.[9] Self-worth, on the other hand, is experienced more deeply. Self-worth is about what you feel and believe you deserve.
If you’re in a maladaptive mindset, it’s not necessarily that you feel worthless. You just don’t feel fully worthy right now. You think that after you finish fixing yourself (i.e., making yourself superficially perfect and therefore worthy), then you’ll finally deserve that which you most long for. You live in a state of waiting.
For procrastinator perfectionists, it looks like waiting too long and then never doing it.
Goals are terminal; ideals are continual. After a perfectionist reaches a goal, they always create a new goal, a bigger goal, because their true interest lies in chasing the ideal that the goal represents.
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 we regularly feel obligated to act in ways that betray our needs, goals, and values, the obligation is usually to a standard of behavioral perfection we don’t realize we’re adhering to.
The process started out perfectly, so the pressure is on; the rest of their life must unfold perfectly because in their eyes, they have no excuse for it not to.
The perfectionist feels they’re telling a lie—they’re only pretending to be worthy, so they better get their story straight.
However, when you’re imposing perfectionistic standards on yourself because you think others expect perfection from you, you may be more vulnerable to humiliation and shame because you feel there’s an “audience” watching you.
Adaptive perfectionists also learn how to stop making the number one mistake perfectionists make, which is to respond to missteps with self-punishment.
When she most needs love and support, she pushes everyone away with out-of-line behavior and social withdrawal.
“Can’t you see that you’re already in enough pain? You don’t need more pain; you need more compassion.”
Negative self-talk is a self-punishment and an extremely insidious one at that. If you make a habit of berating yourself, you’ll experience chronic guilt that morphs into shame.
Your brain likes streamlined; hence, you gravitate towards what’s familiar even when what’s familiar is hurting you and you know it.
Procrastinator perfectionists plan to make a plan about learning how to best make a plan. Messy perfectionists play Jenga with their goals, continuing to shift the top priority in a way that’s built to collapse.
If you can’t let go of your attachment to the outcome, you will spend your life trading one fear for the other.
When you focus on the process, you focus on the victories that are happening now.
When you set an intention, you’re giving yourself a way to feel success, satisfaction, and enjoyment during the process, not just in the afterglow of goal attainment.
Letting go of a goal that isn’t aligned with your values isn’t quitting-quitting, it’s power-quitting.
Self-compassion begins with giving yourself permission to encounter what you feel. Once you acknowledge that you’re in pain, you need to respond to your pain with kindness instead of criticism.
A compassionate response is a response that offers connection.
Retreating into your imagination or otherwise disassociating is adaptive in powerless situations.
Just because the connection is falling flat now doesn’t mean it won’t kick in retroactively later.
Parasocial relationships are no substitute for real-life relationships, but they are meaningful connections, nonetheless.
Psychologically, liminal spaces feel like being in two places at once while also being nowhere.
When you ruminate, you mistake replay for reflection. When you catastrophize, you mistake worrying for preparation.
As a perfectionist, you will constantly encounter some version of the question “Am I doing enough?”
