So many great comments here. My own battle against my perfectionism includes not milling about anxiously in the comments section after I post a new column, so please bear with me if I rediscover an old thread weeks later! I try to get to everything eventually, but want to do so without getting too wound up / measuring the success of any given bit of writing. You can believe in the quality of your work/ self and still fall prey to the weird little quantifying structures of online life, particularly on a day when you're feeling more anxious or vulnerable than usual. Or that's my story at the moment! Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who posted here for your smart input - I probably need to write about perfectionism again soon, because it's a major theme in my life at the moment. Today, we embrace fun and mediocrity!
Yes, yes, yes. I loved reading both the letter and the reply.
"I’m sorry for all that you’ve been through. But now you’re here and you’re great. You don’t need to solve anything. Just be here. And look, you can get it wrong again, and trust me, you will! Everyone is distracted and confused and wrong most of the time! That doesn’t mean that joy won’t be yours. You’ll try to live in this moment and sometimes you’ll fail."
God, it's so fucking difficult to shift gears into "being-mode," into presence. Sometimes I feel like I'm just grinding all the way down from overdrive into a lower gear and the whiplash hits hard. I've been paying attention to the things that help me do this. Part of my early 30s is learning my weird body rhythms much better than before and how to manage them. Anxiety and dread in my head? I put the nice loud headphones on that I love and dance it out in my room because I can't think when I feel through music. I don't even care about looking idiotic at this point because I've sunk into the practicality of whatever the hell works to chill me out is what I'm doing. Or I mow the yard, or ask a friend about their life and emotional depths. Poof, head stuff gone for a little bit and body engaged in feeling. Or, I listen to others harder. Other times I need to engage the thoughts and wrestle 'em down, into reality, but most of my self-care takes the form of things that ground me in feeling and out of my head (burning incense, stretching deeply and breathing however I feel like moving in the moment, a bath, cooking - none of which I feel like doing until I start and sink into as I do them). I list these things on a white board because my short term memory sucks, and then I refer to them whenever my head is doing the loopy anxious perfectionist thing. Just start doing the one thing that helps for 5 minutes, imperfectly and incomplete.
I have a history of ED as well and I feel like the focus on the future/past (and the cocommitant anxiety/depression) is a familiar and comforting place to retreat to despite having been recovered for many years. Part of that is retreating into a perfect future me who does everything right and is shiny and reworks all the messy shit into a beautifully coherent story, and at other times it is dropping into the gloom of a future failed me who never figures it out. The most comforting and beautiful and present place to be is neither of those ideas - it's somewhere between being saved by perfection and drowning in failure. It's seeing myself as someone who is growing and learning and messing up - admitting I messed up, shrugging, moving on as best I can. It's a sapling that keeps bending toward the sun through the daily and cyclical obstacles that inevitably come. Adapting. Telling myself that the thoughts I feed myself take me toward nourishment and presence or away from it, and also laughing at the loudness of the bad shit in my head when it won't shut up. This:
"YOU’RE FUNNY. You’re a funny little weirdo who looooves to tax her evil brains until she solves everything. It’s cute how hard you try not to be who you are. "
I think about my own struggle to find an identity that's not hell bent on perfection, overworking, or being the best/skinniest/most whatever person at something. I used to never take a sick day, schedule vacations when it was convinient for everyone else. What if I actually tell myself I know I am highly capable but choose when it's a good idea to go all out versus save some energy for things outside of work? What if rest today and let my partner do that 1 thing they offered to do to help me instead of caretaking them while I'm exhausted? What if I decide that I'm not as skinny as feels safe when I have bad body image but that I can find safety in knowing my goodness from and through myself and others who care about me? Idk, just some questions to ponder. I love what ifs as thought experiments and life experiments. What if I try this small new thing just once and see how it goes?
Anyways, thanks to Heather for great insights, ponderings, and words for the day - and thanks to LW for reaching out and sharing their struggles.
PS: Book pre-ordered!! Love the cover design - esp the choice w/ the woman's side glance into the distance / out past the viewer. Yes!
"It will be stupid and beautiful." I love this. This I can do.
When I was married, my then-husband and I were both good cooks and proud of it. We were getting ready to go to a potluck and take some of our Good Cooking, but my cooking didn't come out as good as usual that day and I was fretting. I had put all my ego eggs into the being-better-than-others basket and that got me a PhD, but it did not get me happiness or peace of mind. My husband had some good advice: "Stop trying to be perfect. People don't like being around perfect people." He was right, but here's the problem: I wasn't trying to be perfect to get people to like me! I wanted to be above them, un-criticizable. I wanted to wall myself off in an icy princess castle of safety. My perfection was both an act of fear and a preemptive strike, and other people saw through it.
Trying to be perfect was like a superstitious childhood ritual. I worked very hard at it as a child growing up in a violent alcoholic family. It gave me something to do, a goal, hope. It might have kept me going. It didn't make me feel safe, but it did get me scholarships so I could get the hell out of there. But by then, the perfection-needing pattern was deeply grooved.
During the pandemic I started going to Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings and that has been helpful. A think a lot of my maladaptive behavior comes from my childhood trauma. ACA is helping in subtle ways. I have things to do that help, slowly. Here's the first change I have noticed: when I am doing yard work, I can now do it slowly and without keyed-up tense rushing around. I didn't even realize I was doing that before! I didn't know there was another way, and if someone had told me, I couldn't have forced myself to calm down. This change came without any thought on my part. I guess something inside has un-knotted in some way. I'm grateful. It feels good. But I didn't (directly) make it happen.
I guess that's the whole point of 12-step programs: your willpower cannot ultimately fix you. It's not powerful enough, no matter how hard you try. That's actually great news because trying so hard all the time is exhausting and un-creative and un-fun. It doesn't have to be like that. Life should have a good amount of fun.
I also over-intellectualize emotional problems... once I managed to stop doing that I was better able to live in the present. Now I feel the feels and accept them, instead of trying to make sense of them. And when I realized that I tried to stifle traits in myself that I adore in other women, I stopped doing that, too, and grew to love myself. Heather's writing helped me with this and I am forever grateful. Thank you!
I needed this so much. Bearing the weight of the world on your shoulders is so exhausting and draining. I'm convinced that nothing in my life will ever work out unless I exert an active plan and follow all the steps correctly. Maybe the state of being in self-acceptance is how things work out?
I love this post. Especially for me it was just really needed. I don't understand either how perfectionism creeps into my life. Accepting all my quirks and weirdness without having to fix everything is a state of mind I haven't visited in a long time. I didn't even realize how I fixated I became on fixing things. It feels good give myself the permission to relax even if things are not 'perfect,' and perhaps they never will be. So I probably should relax anyway :P
So many great comments here. My own battle against my perfectionism includes not milling about anxiously in the comments section after I post a new column, so please bear with me if I rediscover an old thread weeks later! I try to get to everything eventually, but want to do so without getting too wound up / measuring the success of any given bit of writing. You can believe in the quality of your work/ self and still fall prey to the weird little quantifying structures of online life, particularly on a day when you're feeling more anxious or vulnerable than usual. Or that's my story at the moment! Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who posted here for your smart input - I probably need to write about perfectionism again soon, because it's a major theme in my life at the moment. Today, we embrace fun and mediocrity!
Yes, yes, yes. I loved reading both the letter and the reply.
"I’m sorry for all that you’ve been through. But now you’re here and you’re great. You don’t need to solve anything. Just be here. And look, you can get it wrong again, and trust me, you will! Everyone is distracted and confused and wrong most of the time! That doesn’t mean that joy won’t be yours. You’ll try to live in this moment and sometimes you’ll fail."
God, it's so fucking difficult to shift gears into "being-mode," into presence. Sometimes I feel like I'm just grinding all the way down from overdrive into a lower gear and the whiplash hits hard. I've been paying attention to the things that help me do this. Part of my early 30s is learning my weird body rhythms much better than before and how to manage them. Anxiety and dread in my head? I put the nice loud headphones on that I love and dance it out in my room because I can't think when I feel through music. I don't even care about looking idiotic at this point because I've sunk into the practicality of whatever the hell works to chill me out is what I'm doing. Or I mow the yard, or ask a friend about their life and emotional depths. Poof, head stuff gone for a little bit and body engaged in feeling. Or, I listen to others harder. Other times I need to engage the thoughts and wrestle 'em down, into reality, but most of my self-care takes the form of things that ground me in feeling and out of my head (burning incense, stretching deeply and breathing however I feel like moving in the moment, a bath, cooking - none of which I feel like doing until I start and sink into as I do them). I list these things on a white board because my short term memory sucks, and then I refer to them whenever my head is doing the loopy anxious perfectionist thing. Just start doing the one thing that helps for 5 minutes, imperfectly and incomplete.
I have a history of ED as well and I feel like the focus on the future/past (and the cocommitant anxiety/depression) is a familiar and comforting place to retreat to despite having been recovered for many years. Part of that is retreating into a perfect future me who does everything right and is shiny and reworks all the messy shit into a beautifully coherent story, and at other times it is dropping into the gloom of a future failed me who never figures it out. The most comforting and beautiful and present place to be is neither of those ideas - it's somewhere between being saved by perfection and drowning in failure. It's seeing myself as someone who is growing and learning and messing up - admitting I messed up, shrugging, moving on as best I can. It's a sapling that keeps bending toward the sun through the daily and cyclical obstacles that inevitably come. Adapting. Telling myself that the thoughts I feed myself take me toward nourishment and presence or away from it, and also laughing at the loudness of the bad shit in my head when it won't shut up. This:
"YOU’RE FUNNY. You’re a funny little weirdo who looooves to tax her evil brains until she solves everything. It’s cute how hard you try not to be who you are. "
I think about my own struggle to find an identity that's not hell bent on perfection, overworking, or being the best/skinniest/most whatever person at something. I used to never take a sick day, schedule vacations when it was convinient for everyone else. What if I actually tell myself I know I am highly capable but choose when it's a good idea to go all out versus save some energy for things outside of work? What if rest today and let my partner do that 1 thing they offered to do to help me instead of caretaking them while I'm exhausted? What if I decide that I'm not as skinny as feels safe when I have bad body image but that I can find safety in knowing my goodness from and through myself and others who care about me? Idk, just some questions to ponder. I love what ifs as thought experiments and life experiments. What if I try this small new thing just once and see how it goes?
Anyways, thanks to Heather for great insights, ponderings, and words for the day - and thanks to LW for reaching out and sharing their struggles.
PS: Book pre-ordered!! Love the cover design - esp the choice w/ the woman's side glance into the distance / out past the viewer. Yes!
Godfuckingdamnit. This is so real.
(Also: new book cover & release date!! Congratulations!!)
"It will be stupid and beautiful." I love this. This I can do.
When I was married, my then-husband and I were both good cooks and proud of it. We were getting ready to go to a potluck and take some of our Good Cooking, but my cooking didn't come out as good as usual that day and I was fretting. I had put all my ego eggs into the being-better-than-others basket and that got me a PhD, but it did not get me happiness or peace of mind. My husband had some good advice: "Stop trying to be perfect. People don't like being around perfect people." He was right, but here's the problem: I wasn't trying to be perfect to get people to like me! I wanted to be above them, un-criticizable. I wanted to wall myself off in an icy princess castle of safety. My perfection was both an act of fear and a preemptive strike, and other people saw through it.
Trying to be perfect was like a superstitious childhood ritual. I worked very hard at it as a child growing up in a violent alcoholic family. It gave me something to do, a goal, hope. It might have kept me going. It didn't make me feel safe, but it did get me scholarships so I could get the hell out of there. But by then, the perfection-needing pattern was deeply grooved.
During the pandemic I started going to Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings and that has been helpful. A think a lot of my maladaptive behavior comes from my childhood trauma. ACA is helping in subtle ways. I have things to do that help, slowly. Here's the first change I have noticed: when I am doing yard work, I can now do it slowly and without keyed-up tense rushing around. I didn't even realize I was doing that before! I didn't know there was another way, and if someone had told me, I couldn't have forced myself to calm down. This change came without any thought on my part. I guess something inside has un-knotted in some way. I'm grateful. It feels good. But I didn't (directly) make it happen.
I guess that's the whole point of 12-step programs: your willpower cannot ultimately fix you. It's not powerful enough, no matter how hard you try. That's actually great news because trying so hard all the time is exhausting and un-creative and un-fun. It doesn't have to be like that. Life should have a good amount of fun.
I also over-intellectualize emotional problems... once I managed to stop doing that I was better able to live in the present. Now I feel the feels and accept them, instead of trying to make sense of them. And when I realized that I tried to stifle traits in myself that I adore in other women, I stopped doing that, too, and grew to love myself. Heather's writing helped me with this and I am forever grateful. Thank you!
I needed this so much. Bearing the weight of the world on your shoulders is so exhausting and draining. I'm convinced that nothing in my life will ever work out unless I exert an active plan and follow all the steps correctly. Maybe the state of being in self-acceptance is how things work out?
By the last paragraph, I was crying so hard the words became blurry. And laughing at the same time.
“Nothing is good enough for her, so she does nothing at all.” Fuck. Me.
Thanks Polly! I can't wait to read your book!!
Thank you
I love this post. Especially for me it was just really needed. I don't understand either how perfectionism creeps into my life. Accepting all my quirks and weirdness without having to fix everything is a state of mind I haven't visited in a long time. I didn't even realize how I fixated I became on fixing things. It feels good give myself the permission to relax even if things are not 'perfect,' and perhaps they never will be. So I probably should relax anyway :P