A letter to chronic perfectionists

You did the thing, ticked the box but satisfaction didn't come. For you, caring is a constant, yet that certainty doesn't translate to how you'll feel when it's over. If you care this much, how come you get the void?

At its worst, this tension makes you not pursue projects that you'd love to do – who'd want to willingly go through all that again on your free time?

Yet there's still a reason you keep caring and pushing yourself that hard, sometimes to the point of wearing yourself down to dust.

The garage

Picture a hobby band playing in their garage. They don't care about making a perfect song, or playing it perfectly in one go. It's scrappy, gritty, freeing, fun and ultimately alive.

They still care about making great things, of course, but it's not suffocating and especially it's not to prove a point to anyone. There's enjoyment inherent to respecting the craft itself and improving yourself, of which the main spectator is you.

The gap between where you are and want to be doesn't cause stress, and doesn't diminish the value of you as a person. The gap is about vision and exploration.

The recital

Now picture a recital. You feel the stress of people staring and judging you, or rather, the picture of them in your mind.

Those people might not even be there – most of the time they aren't. You took every parallel universe, timeline and branch, inflated the probability of everything wrong happening, then condensed it down to a demon-core-shaped inner critic.

You become fixated on truly making things perfect. Forget about the freeing sensation from earlier.

"Well, the stress keeps me in check" you think to yourself. Yet ultimately that line of thought ends up betraying you, expressing somatically through muscle tension. You make some mistakes, each one feeling like a dagger cutting through you, yet it's decoupled from reality – was it really that bad?

Scrappiness is a failure. It doesn't bring joy.

Finally it's over, hopefully no one noticed. You get the emptiness again, but it feels weighty and dense like fog.

Maybe you do end up persevering and doing it perfect next time. And the other. Maybe it's even more perfect than if you had gone the garage route – but it doesn't add to your experience, it takes away a bit out of your soul. The spark and emotion that got you started in your field is lost along the way, losing the human touch.

That resentment makes you avoid performing in the first place. The way you deliver to the world looks more like a sine wave, peaks of going all-out to get it over with followed by troughs where people wonder where you are, all while the increasing standards make the swings harder.

But I feel like I'm in a bit of both at times...

That's the catch. We start at the garage, but the pull of unhealthy perfectionism drags us to the recital. It's probably not as dramatic as either extreme.

It takes constant, conscious effort to pull away. At first you'll notice when you're already there, but as you develop the muscle you'll feel the pull without having to be mid-air.

Feel stressed? Take a pause and think to yourself: are you at the recital or the garage?