“Wait, what? This again?”
Just when I thought I had a grasp on my relationship with perfectionism, it pops back up and rears its maladapted head.
I’ve written about the false protection that perfection advertises but does not deliver. About relaxing into the experimentation, learning and freedom inherent in failure as opposed to the breathless clench of trying to do everything exactly right.
In Katherine Morgan Schafler’s book The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control, she makes the distinction between adaptive perfectionists who strive and achieve from a place of power and maladaptive ones who strive from the need to compensate for perceived inadequacies and avoid failure.
“Maladaptive perfectionists,” writes Morgan Schafler, “are perpetually on some version of a joy diet.”
Despite my own experience, I’ve totally been on that joy diet lately. Which is annoying and a drag. I thought I’d sorted this stuff, for crying out loud. But it turns out it’s just a new wave on my ocean.
In a recent newsletter, poet Andrea Gibson wrote:
Culture instructs us to think that the sea of life should be tranquil, and any ripple means something has gone wrong. But the sea was never meant to be calm. Waves are part of the design. A static ocean would not sustain life, nor would a challengeless existence. I know this for sure—the parts of my life that have threatened to sink me were the parts that awoke me to my capacity to sail.
This is so me. All my alarm bells sound when anything goes wrong. Any. Flippin’. Thing. Somewhere along the way, I got this idea that if I’m doing life right, there are no waves.
Andrea Gibson goes on to write:
If a person is caught in a literal riptide, their instinct will be to fight against the current. But any lifeguard or survival guide will instruct the opposite. If the waters are rough, relax your body and float. Resisting the waves will tire you out, making you all the more likely to drown. This is true for the waters of life as well.
Almost exactly ten years ago, I wrote What Living Feels Like, an essay that was published on Full Grown People (I hope you’ll read it. Honestly, I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.). In it, I tell the story of my husband Frank and me getting caught in a riptide off the coast of Dominica. Along with us was a 10-year-old boy from the village...who (unbeknownst to us) didn’t know how to swim.
There was something in the deafening sound of the waves and the jagged dangerous-looking rocks on either side of us that gave the ever-smaller beach straight ahead a hypnotic pull. A wave would crash over the boy and me, and I just kept my eyes on that little crescent of sand and kept pulling. Frank called out, “We’re supposed to swim to the side!” He was right. I knew that when caught in a rip tide, the way out is, counter-intuitively, to swim parallel to the shore to get out of the current. But here, in this narrow, rocky cove, to swim parallel to the shore meant to go straight into the teeth of rocks on either side. I squeezed the boy’s arm and swam harder. But as a concession to the whole “swim parallel” thing, I aimed on a slight angle: rather than directly at the beach that I so desperately wanted to get to, I oriented us a just little to the left. I pulled and pulled the whimpering boy behind me.
Spoiler alert: We did not drown that day. I learned a bunch of things from the experience and one of them was that waves are going to happen. It’s best not to fight them but to find a way to move through them so they don’t take me down.
So yes, perfectionism is likely going to be something that ebbs away and then swells back again for me. For you, it might be impatience with others or habits of numbing out or procrastination. It might be challenges in a relationship, a financial hit or a health crisis like Andrea Gibson.
As she writes, “I was in the habit of telling myself the waves were not supposed to be happening. When I accepted they would always be part of my life, I learned to surf (aka – ride the board on my belly.)”
Waves are not just natural, they are healthy and normal. When I remember that, I can relax and find the trajectory that will put my feet back on solid sand.