Today I Learned... That I'm a Perfectionist
Thank you, best therapist I ever had
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Today, as I complained to my therapist about some work stuff I was struggling with and how I was so annoyed at myself for not having already written and published the Raising Gen Alpha post I had started twice that just had to go out today for some arbitrary reason, they described to me what perfectionism actually was.
“But I never think this has to be perfect,” I told them.
What they said next basically convinced me that, oh shit, they were right. Despite me being an admitted lifelong overachiever and constantly joking that I have perfectionistic tendencies, I never truly thought I was a perfectionist. Honestly, it just never occurred to me that I could be good enough to be a perfectionist.
And because I’ve got a shit memory thanks to my ADHD, I can’t recreate the conversation for you in a way that would actually make any kind of sense. Instead, I’ll tell you this:
As I opened the door to my car after therapy, sat down in the driver’s seat, and unlocked my phone to read a text message from my husband, my mouth dropped open. Just minutes before my therapy appointment had even finished, he texted me to check out the latest episode of one of our favorite podcasts, Hidden Brain.
It’s called “Escaping Perfectionism.”
FACEPALM. (Yes, I opted to type that out instead of looking for a cute photo or finding a funny meme/GIF/whatever.)
The episode description reads: Perfectionism is everyone’s favorite flaw. It’s easy to assume that our push to be perfect is what leads to academic, athletic and professional success. But psychologist Thomas Curran says perfectionism has a dark side, and that there are much healthier ways to strive for excellence.
As I listened to the episode hours later while putting my son down to bed, I realized that not only did I relate to pretty much everything that Curran said about his personal and professional experience with perfectionism, but that there were also specific parts that applied to what I’m doing here. As in, here, on Substack. (But also a little bit, here in life.)
Here’s what is said starting at 28:40 mins with Curran describing perfectionism so perfectly and later explaining diminishing productivity returns in a way that really, really resonated with me when it comes to my writing:
On Self-Sabotaging Thought Patterns: “Yeah, perfectionistic people, people who are on the perfectionism spectrum, what you tend to see is that they also score higher on what we would call ‘self-sabotaging thought patterns.’ Things like you mentioned there—worry, rumination. They’re really hyper-vigilant about where they sit relative to others, how they’re performing relative to others. They find it very difficult to exist in the moment or be mindful or appreciate successes. And so perfectionistic people really find it difficult to thrive or flourish because they’re constantly worried about what’s going wrong or how other people are doing.” - Thomas Curran
Hello, I immediately think about how even though I’ve just gone through a major depressive episode so putting in my typical amount of effort was impossible anyway, it’s also probably true that I haven’t put in as much effort into my writing here because I didn’t have a magic, shiny, happiness and rainbows overnight success story that I subconsciously desperately wanted cause #perfectionism.
And then, he spoke about what he called “diminishing productivity returns,” which is in a lot of the scholarly productivity literature.
On Diminishing Productivity Returns: “We know perfectionists work really hard and they push themselves well beyond comfort into a zone of declining and diminishing returns for every little bit of effort that they put in. Failure is very common among perfectionistic people because the goals they set themselves are way too high. And, even if they do succeed, perfectionism really just turns those successes into dead ends because the better we do, the better we feel that we’re expected to do and so we just continually keep ourselves on tip-toes, clinging for more and more. I suppose it’s like running on a treadmill that never slows down. So it’s really tough, the success equation for perfectionists because they really feel that they’ve never made it.” - Thomas Curran
Aaaaand now I put the dots together between therapy and this guy’s knowledge of perfectionism, realizing that my perfectionism is 1) causing my belief that it’s my fault that Raising Gen Alpha isn’t yet all that I dreamed it could be (my self-sabotaging thought pattern) and 2) that belief that I already failed is now causing me to be struggling even more because this fucking treadmill will just not slow down (diminishing productivity returns).
So that’s it.
That’s what I’ve got, for today, for right now.
This is not the post that I planned to write. This is not the two different posts I started within two hours of each other earlier today. This is not the post that I would have ever thought I’d write anywhere, ever. I mean, I didn’t even fully know that I was a perfectionist until a couple hours ago, so how could I?
Sigh.
Currently, my perfectionist side is telling me to wrap up this essay into a cute little bow, with a cherry on top that says “look, everything’s better now! I figured it out!”. That’s certainly what I would like to hear right now. But it it’s. And I haven’t.
Talk soon,
Irina (she/her) - raising a March 2020 gen alpha kid
Remember your friend Tawny texting you books about Perfectionism? Me and Adam know you!
Big mood