Failure and Perfectionism

I’ve spent a good deal of time over the last five years trying to figure out why I hate failure so much. I mean, I don’t just dislike it. It causes a meltdown in my brain that is both unhelpful and causes a kind of emotional shutdown. I’ve been watching it more carefully just the last few months, making a list of failures. I thought at first I was going to learn how to celebrate failure by doing this, but that wasn’t what happened. At least not yet.

What happened was that I noticed that the failures I listed were all things that I wasn’t immediately good at. And then I started to remember that I had several children who were like this. And are still like this. They are so incredibly smart that they almost never had to study even through high school and college. At some point, they hit the metaphorical wall and it was a huge struggle for them to figure out what it is like to learn things from the ground up, things that they weren’t automatically good at and that they didn’t just do without any thought or practice.

Several of these kids complained loudly that they were failing, some of them for multiple years in a row. Each time they go into new situations, they again feel like they are failing and are loud about their hatred of this experience.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

I have come to the conclusion that my feelings about failure aren’t about failure at all. I don’t fail very often. What I’ve been calling “failures” are really just situations in which I am frustrated because I don’t know the answer quickly. And I am used to knowing the answer quickly. I’ve been told many times in my life that other people are surprised at how many things I do well. In my head, I think that this is not necessarily a compliment. I believe I only do one thing really superbly (writing) and other things moderately well. But my level of moderately well is, I admit when I look at it honestly, a level absurdly above the norm.

I am excellent at triathlon, even if I’m currently frustrated with my Achilles injury and moan loudly about how I will probably never run again. I’m not nationally ranked above 1,000 for my age group anymore. Boo hoo. I’m sure you all feel very sorry for me.

I am extremely good at knitting and crocheting.

I am a good parent, and a fairly good friend (something I’ve been working on for a long time).

To my surprise, I am good at ANSWERING PHONES! And supervising other people! And doing financial things!

I kill it when it comes to passing tests (as long as they are not driving tests).

I could go on and on, but you get the point. And I am trying to make MY brain get the point, too. I am so good at so many things so easily that I am impatient with any normal length of time to learn new things. I hope this doesn’t sound like a humble brag. It has genuinely been a huge problem for me, that I meltdown emotionally at small problems because I don’t have the normal amount of experience with them. I feel like I’m a toddler at times. And yeah, maybe I am a toddler. Delayed development for many reasons, autism and abuse and religious trauma among them.