You and I Are Too Old to Believe We Need to Be Perfect. We Already Are
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life From an Ageist Society
Reflections on perfection as we march into yet another year
You are a human being. You are not what you do or what you have or who you’re with or what you look like. You are an expansive, powerful, large, ever-changing force in the world, like an ocean-not some tiny forgotten room in an old run-down house. The larger you allow yourself to be, the easier it is to find your way back to yourself.
No, that’s not Marianne Williamson. Sounds like her.
That snippet, one of my faves, is from the book
The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control
A Path to Peace and Power
by Katherine Morgan Schafler
This book was published on my birthday last year, January 17th. My buddy
got it for me as a gift. As someone who has put herself through the proverbial fires of Hell trying to be what is impossible- perfect in the eyes of society- this book was such a blessing.That’s why I am suggesting it as you and I stumble and bumble our way into 2024, full of good intentions and hopes for a new year. New you.
The magical “new you” happens second-to-second, moment-to-moment.
Each millisecond we are adding impressions and emotions and thoughts and ideas which weren’t there before. Our cells are dying and regenerating and our bodies are changing. YOU have changed in millions of ways in the time it’s taken you to read this paragraph.
You are new a thousand times over even as you got this far in the article. That’s a miracle.
As I have written before, New Year’s Resolutions as we know them are largely worthless. A gift we might consider giving ourselves, instead, is permission. Permission, for those of us who struggle with imperfection infection, to realize that it’s not a mental illness or a problem that we need to fix with therapy or pills.
It’s not something to “recover from.” Perfectionism isn’t a problem or a burden or an issue. Like a powerful, wild horse, it’s a great force we get to respect, learn to harness and collaborate with to our mutual advantage.
We don’t kill the horse. We learn to work with it, and ride on its back as it chases the proverbial sunset.
Perfectionism is, in fact, one hell of a gift. We are already perfect- for this moment. We’re constantly evolving. The compulsive need to fix what doesn’t need fixing is what causes us grief.
You and I are WAY Too Old to try to be perfect, when we’ve been just fine all along.
Where we are in our bodies, our lives, our process, our personal growth is precisely where we should be. May not feel that way, but we are exactly where we need to be right now.
That’s true if we’re obese or ill or damaged. All of us go through some version of this over the course of a long life.
We’re always in a state of becoming. As a result, we’re either constantly imperfect and we’re horrified, or we can slowly learn that we’re perfect as we are, and enjoying the journey as we morph into the next version of ourselves.
Perfectionism need not feel like a prison sentence, but a way to deliver the kinds of dreams we want to realize.
Just to make a point, here is a Goodreads list of all the books on perfectionism. The preponderance treat it as a problem. Not all, but enough.
This is how society takes a tendency, brands it a mental illness and a blight, then shames us for it (especially women) and heaps that accusation on top of everything else we just can’t get right.
Schafler explains in the first part of the book that there are certain types of perfectionists. Self-help books all too often slip into creating “styles” with which we can identify. While informative, that wasn’t quite as wonderful as when she dips a big soup spoon into the grace that perfectionism can offer as a superpower.
That’s when this book shines.
Once you get past the styles piece you’re eased into an exquisite conversation which causes you to feel like you’ve finally been heard: that your need to be perfect isn’t a problem to be solved.
Schafler herself is a perfectionist, and a therapist. That combination is why I so love this book. She lives it, breathes, understands it, and loves it. You are made to feel loved because of this tendency, not here’s one more big piece of you that needs to be removed like an infected appendix.
Still, bet you can relate, some of us slip into the extreme. That of course is the part which needs loving attention and redirection. Not removal.
My kind of compulsive perfectionism drove me to eating disorders. That’s the skill gone haywire. At some deep level I believed that were I just perfect, no one would rape me again. Somehow I could rewrite the story of incest.
That finally, finally, I would be worth loving, not just worth fucking and discarding. Oh, the stories we tell ourselves, and then use perfection as a way to solve the problem of being such a messy us.
What a change of pace to see something that so many of us see as a problem or a burden as a superpower.
Unfortunately there are some strong voices continuing to perpetuate the negative aspect of perfectionism as though that is the only aspect of it. To wit,
Brene Brown wrote:
Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of blame, judgement, and shame.
While I like some of her work, in this quote, she’s wrong to imply that ALL perfectionism is bad. As Schafler points out, helping us understand that this tendency is a gift, we can also understand that this, like all gifts, comes with a proviso.
If and when, IF AND WHEN, perfectionism becomes addictive, as it does with some of us, it can be destructive.
To be fair to Brown, her take can be seen in the loss of the extraordinarily brilliant Black woman in society, at the top of her game, when that game ends in early death or suicide. If you are attending the news, the number of deaths among very senior-level, PhD Black women and Black women and children has risen sharply.
To that, a quote from this article in The Nation:
Relatedly, there is also a pressing need for greater investigation of how the perfectionist “Strong Black Woman schema,” as psychologists have described it, which Black women may adopt to counter gendered racism, can have detrimental mental health consequences for both Black women and girls.
Are there aspects of perfectionism which are, not to overstate here, deadly?
Of course. Those societal issues, as above, which are driven by racism and misogyny need to be addressed, and NOW, before we lose generation after generation of brilliant Black talent, brilliant female talent, brilliant talent period.
What drove me to near-suicide were the eating disorders which have their deep roots in female perfection. So yes, it’s personal.
Men and boys can be consumed by bigorexia -when they feel they aren’t muscular enough-when they are surrounded by images of Jason Momoa and Chris Hemsworth. Eating disorders are on the sharp rise with men as well, for the same reasons we women struggle with them.
It’s a misdirection of that energy, like most disorders when we try to dissipate our anxiety and pain about our imperfect perfection.
Lumping all aspects of perfectionism into the same bucket is simplistic. That makes it all too easy to just assume that if I have this tendency, then I am flawed and here is just one more thing wrong with me.
My journey has been to change how I see perfectionism, and to understand how it has played a role in my greatest achievements. That’s the mind-change that gives us access to perfectionism as superpower.
Here’s how that has worked for me.
I tried to write a book on networking skills long ago. I wanted it to be perfect, and it ground its way through four years of incessant edits. Finally I shit-canned it, deservedly. In 2010, I had a Big Idea, and that idea became a published book nine months later. I traded perfection for passion, hired the transcript to a professional proofreader, and the result won multiple prizes.
And there are typos. One or two.
I could still be laboring over that stupid networking book. For writers, this is likely familiar. No matter what we write, it could be better. I redirected the energy around perfectionism to producing the best possible writing. Then I found a damned good editor who ripped the transcript out of my claws and made it sing.
You and I are fine just as we are.
We are doing our level best just as we are. Especially as we age, when we can fall in love with the falling breasts, we are Masters of the Universe.
To that, a quote I found this morning while reading Patrick Roden, PhD’s marvelous new book Women, Aging and Myths: 10 Steps to Loving Your Long Life:
Gypsy Rose Lee spoke about growing older and accepted herself at any age. For example, she once exclaimed, “I’ve got everything I’ve always had. Only now it’s six inches lower.” A Woman’s Almanac, 1977, by Barbara McDowell and Hana Umlauf.
The perfection isn’t in the body. It’s in the attitude.
Changing our minds is the hardest change of all. Changing our attitudes about ourselves and about aging, about how we have to be perfect to be lovable is the work of the goddesses.
Men have just as much access to this part of themselves as we do.
As you and I march, limp, gimp, roll, run, race and stumble our way into 2024, I hope this perspective is the gift it’s intended to be. Perfection needn’t be weaponized. It is an invitation to harness our best and love the ride, and celebrate our efforts.
Even if the results, ultimately, are “six inches lower than they used to be.”
Let’s play.
Warm thanks for hanging with me this morning. My god we’re almost halfway through January and the last time I looked up it was Christmas. Are you making the time work for you? Are you joyful? I hope this article gave you some ways to better ensure that. If so please consider
If you know someone who could use a little relief from relentless perfectionism, please consider
Either way, you’re good. You really are good, right here, right now, just as you are. Thank you.
Sometimes I feel like you're my personal cheerleader — and the cool thing is, I know it's not just me. I too nearly wore myself to a nub trying to meet society's mysterious, shifting, and contradictory standards for young women. And once I caught on, I beat myself up for being so unsure of my identity that I needed all that external validation. It's been such a relief to step away from that vicious cycle. Cheers to you for helping free others from it.
This is wonderful, and much needed--thank you. As a perfectionist, I completely relate to taking on the project of “fixing” my perfectionism, so this is such a great reminder to relax my grip on that. 🙏