Perfectionism

This is a collaboration. Clarified and I each took perfectionism from opposite ends —I trace the defense and the bargain it makes; he writes it from the inside, in scene.

We're each publishing both pieces, back to back, so you can read the terrain from both directions.

The Mask of Virtue

by Joseph Teskey

My perfectionism built a cathedral I could never enter. I only stood outside it, wondering what might be inside.

I know how that sounds. Let us say it plainly instead.

There is work I have not shown anybody because it was not ready. Writing not sent because a better version existed, somewhere, in a future that I kept almost reaching. Whole years spent avoiding doing the thing that would, finally, be good enough to show — and the not-showing somehow felt like diligence. Like care. Like “high standards.” It was none of those. It was hiding in the one costume that hiding is never suspected of wearing.

This is perfectionism, and it is shame’s most virtuous disguise.

Shame says: you are not enough as you are. It is a brutal sentence, and most of us would do anything to get out from under it. Perfectionism steps forward with the only deal that seems to answer it:then become enough. Be flawless, be beyond reproach, and you will finally be safe from the verdict. It sounds like rescue. The whole world applauds it — calls it conscientious, calls it excellence, calls it a strong work ethic.

But look at what you agreed to the moment you took the deal. You conceded the premise. You accepted that you are not acceptable as you are: that acceptability is something you must manufacture, at a price, forever. Every effort to become perfect is a fresh signature on a founding lie. Perfectionism doesn’t cure shame. It works for shame. It is the deputy, enforcing the sentence while convincing you it’s staging the escape.

And what makes it so cruel: perfection is not a real place. It is a horizon, forever just beyond grasp.

A standard you could reach would, at least, be merciful — you would arrive, and rest. But perfection recedes exactly as fast as you approach it. Hit the mark and the mark moves, because the mark was never the point; the point was to outrun a feeling, and you cannot outrun a feeling by getting better at things. So often, the most driven person in the room is also the least relieved. The closer I got to good, the further good seemed from perfect, and perfect was the only thing that counted.

The flawless self is a self that cannot be diminished, cannot be ordinary, cannot die. Falling short never feels like a small thing. It feels like extinction. We are not, at bottom, trying to be beyond criticism. We are trying to be beyond loss.

Which is how you lose years in the in-between.

Because once you learn you must be perfect, you can no longer let yourself be good. Good is not allowed. Good is the failure that looks most like success, and therefore the most dangerous. So the work that is merely good — finished, honest, useful, real — never gets to exist, because it would prove you are a person who makes good things and not perfect ones. Better to keep it unbuilt. Better the cathedral in the mind, gleaming and complete and impossible, than the actual chapel you could have raised with your actual hands, standing there in the daylight, plainly imperfect, plainly yours.

I built the gleaming one. For years. I could describe every stained pane of glass. But I never once walked inside, because there was no inside. There was only my wondering. It felt like devotion, but was actually the most elaborate way I ever found to not be seen.

So what changes it? Not a higher standard, and not the slogans — just accept yourself, your feelings are valid. Perfectionism is performance as a way of being, and you cannot perform your way into living.

What changes it is the thing perfectionism is built, above all, to prevent: being seen before you are ready. Handing someone the good-not-perfect thing, the real thing, mid-flaw — and discovering they do not recoil. The work is received. You are received. Not some cathedral built in the mind. The chapel, the earth on rough hands. And the verdict you were sure would come, the one you’d been outrunning your whole life — sunlight across an open door instead.

I think of perfectionism, now, as a brutal critic and a fragile performer locked in the same person — one judging, one performing, both of them watching. Neither of them is in the ring. Neither is in contact with anything real. What’s tragic in that is that the striving was never the enemy. The reach was holy. It was the life in you trying to grow, trying to make something, trying to be worthy of love — conscripted into the service of a lie that told you perfect was the price you pay to be allowed to stay.

You were never failing, because there is no test.

There is only a person, standing outside a cathedral that did not exist, who could have walked into the daylight any time and started, imperfectly, to build.

Come outside. The light is better here, and your life is waiting.

Joseph Teskey is a licensed therapist in New York City specializing in depth-oriented, experiential psychotherapy. He writes about the intersection of clinical work, culture, and what it means to be human in the age of machines. More at josephteskey.com

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Perfectionism Has a Publicist

By Andie Rupp

Nobody boasts about being avoidant. Nobody humblebrags about resentment. Nobody posts about their inability to receive help. Perfectionism is different. It arrives dressed as virtue. Teachers praise it. Employers reward it. Entire cultures celebrate it. The person suffering from it is often admired for their discipline, standards, and work ethic.

Which means the defense gets reinforced long after it has stopped serving the person.

That's what makes perfectionism so difficult to recognize. It rarely feels like fear. It feels like responsibility.

The problem is that perfectionism doesn't begin with a desire to suffer. It begins with a bargain. If I can become flawless enough, indispensable enough, beyond criticism enough, then perhaps I won't have to feel so dependent. Perhaps I won't disappoint anyone. Perhaps I won't be rejected. Perhaps I won't need anyone. Perhaps I can outrun grief, uncertainty, and loss.

At first, the bargain appears to work. The grades, the promotion, the praise, the admiration. The identity of being the reliable one, the competent one, the one who holds everything together. Over time, though, the person who has spent a lifetime being exceptional realizes they no longer know how to rest. Or ask for help. Or tolerate mistakes. Or receive love without earning it. Perfectionism doesn't simply ask for excellence. It asks for immunity.

Immunity from criticism. Immunity from shame. Immunity from dependence. Immunity from being human. And being human turns out to be a terrible thing to fight.

Bodies age. People leave. Children disappoint parents, and parents disappoint children. Mistakes happen. Grief arrives without consulting our schedules. No amount of achievement exempts us from any of it.

What interests me most about perfectionism is that society rarely recognizes it as a defense. It sees someone admirable. Which means the person often spends years believing they are pursuing excellence when, in reality, they are auditioning for safety. The strategy eventually becomes an identity. I am the responsible one. I am the one who gets it right. I am the one who doesn't need anything. Somewhere along the way, adaptation starts to feel like self, not because it is self, but because we've practiced it for so long.

Ernest Becker believed that much of human life is organized around avoiding our limitations. We know we are finite. We know we are dependent. We know we will lose people and eventually be lost ourselves. Then we spend decades constructing ways not to know it. Perfectionism is one of those constructions. Not because striving is bad. Striving can be beautiful. Growth can be beautiful. Mastery can be beautiful. But there is a difference between pursuing excellence and negotiating with mortality. One is an expression of life. The other is an impossible contract.

Perhaps that is why perfectionism becomes so cruel. Not because it demands too much, but because it promises something it can never deliver. Safety. Freedom from grief. Freedom from uncertainty. Freedom from needing others. Freedom from being ordinary. Yet there is no freedom there. There is only exhaustion.

Maybe the tragedy isn't that perfectionism fails. Maybe the tragedy is that it works just well enough to keep us loyal to it. Until grief arrives. Until illness arrives. Until loss arrives. Until love asks something different of us. In those moments, what we discover is that we weren't searching for perfection. We were searching for permission.

Permission to exist without auditioning for the right to. Permission to be loved without earning it. Permission to be limited. Permission to fail. Permission to need. Permission to grieve. Permission to be human.

And perhaps that was never something we had to achieve. Only something we had to stop bargaining away.