What Is Perfectionism?

I found a useful definition of perfectionism for someone who used to always dismiss the idea I was a perfectionist with, “well I’ve never once been perfect, so . . .” Here it is:

Perfectionism is holding yourself to impossibly high or unsustainably high standards such that you always feel “not good enough.”

Using this as the definition of perfectionism, I can see myself more clearly in it. I have always held myself to impossible to sustain standards, which has had the result of me feeling like a failure much of the time, and hustling so hard that I find myself falling into suicidal ideation because I know that I cannot sustain that level of effort anymore and it seems like there are only two choices: keep going on this perfectionist path or stop—and be dead. Being dead, however permanent, seems far preferable to continuing to push myself at the level I do on a daily and even hourly basis most of my life.

Obviously, the real solution is to stop the perfectionism, to stop demanding of myself three or four times the level of effort that normal people see is actually, you know, sustainable long-term without wanting to be dead because you’re so exhausted. But stopping the perfectionism is also incredibly difficult because it is my habit and my brain will continue to tell me if I’m not pushing myself beyond my maximum that I’m lazy or I’m not GOOD ENOUGH.

For most of my life, I’ve wondered why it is that I alone of all the people I know have to continue to produce at insanely high levels of effort that would like kill others. And I haven’t had a good answer for this. Mostly because I don’t often hit a sense of shame or failure. Because I’ve been so successful for most of my life at just ignoring my maximums, going past them, and succeeding—thus giving myself an addictive feedback loop.

I don’t have a lot of experience with failure. Because I don’t let myself fail. I just keep throwing myself at the wall over and over again until I figure it out. I’m aware that other people don’t do this. I don’t actually think I believe I’m better than other people. The reality is that I think I’m less worthy, less lovable, less anything valuable you can imagine, and that is why I alone of all the humans on the planet have to keep doing this.

Or just be dead, because otherwise my life isn’t worth living.

Sigh.

It’s a long road to believe that I deserve love and gentleness, that I don’t have to push myself to the edge of suicidality in order to be good enough to deserve being alive.

(There’s a Mormon hymn that is relevant to this that I sang a lot in my early years with a line: “the world has no need for a drone.” This is followed by more encouragement to work harder, and boy that song clearly goes deep down in my psyche.)

It is taking massive levels of constant surveillance to get my brain to stop telling me to just do a normal level of rest and then go back to what are above-average levels of work for my job, for my training, for my relationships with other people including my children. The default is that I have to keep pushing and pushing because I’m the man behind the curtain, trying to distract everyone with fancy shows of intelligence and effort to make sure that can’t see how powerless and disgusting I actually am all by myself without that.

Sometimes people ask me if I’m competitive. And for most of my life, I would probably have shrugged and said, sometimes.

Yet every person who knows me would laugh at this. The reality is that I don’t think of myself as competitive for the same reason that I don’t think of myself as perfectionist. Because I haven’t been as successful at competitions as my brain tells me I have to be to think of myself as competitive. That is to say, a PhD from Princeton that I started as a teen (age 19) is not enough. Finishing my BA and MA two years after graduating from high school—not enough. Getting a full ride scholarship to one of my top law schools last year, at age 55, not enough. Being the top performer in my category at my company in the entire nation—not enough. Making it to the World Championship in Ironman in Hawaii in 2022, not enough. Publishing a NYT Notable book that was a national bestseller, apparently not enough.

I continue to whip myself to get back on the hamster wheel the second I have achieved something miraculous. Not one moment of celebration, or if I go to the great effort of stopping and celebrating for a moment, then back on the wheel. Somehow I have to retrain my brain to believe that I am not only lovable if I nearly kill myself with effort and that I deserve to do a normal amount of work and still remain good enough. Somehow.