My perfectionism story

What happens when you contort yourself for too long

I started my editing/proofreading job much as anyone starts any job: as an idealistic newbie. I had a fresh MFA in creative writing in my pocket and was sure I was going to love doing a job where I got to work with words all day.

If only it had been that easy.

I’d always been a good editor, but my MFA, and in particular my first MFA advisor, Reiko Rizzuto, had turned me into an amazing editor, in no time flat, so I knew I had the skills for the job. Reiko had also installed in me the importance of using the right word for the job, not its first or second runner-up. I was totally ready to hit the ground running.

I’d learned waaayyy back in high school that writers should look over their own work, but should also always have someone else look over it before turning it in as a final product. You probably learned this, too, and if you didn’t learn it in writing, you probably learned it in some other discipline. It’s solid, sensible advice.

Why?

Because every last one of us needs to be saved from ourselves.

That may sound a bit doom and gloom, or even like some sort of fire and brimstone, but I’m not talking about eternal damnation here, so you can relax. I’m talking about the fact that each one of us has our own foibles and quirks, and also that it’s just impossible for any of us to catch every mistake in our own work.

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

We don’t all know everything, and the more we look at a piece of writing, in this case, or other work, the harder it is to see what we’re looking at as a fresh piece of work, because we’re too familiar with it. It just doesn’t work.

This is, after all, why editors exist.

And this is how it worked in every situation I was in from school on—someone always was there to double-check your work. Your teacher, the editors on the school paper, the other technical writer and the software testers in my technical writing job, fellow teachers when I was teaching…until, ironically enough, I got a paid job as an editor and proofreader.

Then, it was all on me. Not all the time, maybe, but too often, and especially when the work in question was my own writing. (I was not the only editor in the office, and we would often check each other’s stuff, but that was only when our boss didn’t get in the way and actively disallow me from asking her to give my work a look.)

It astonished me. Anyone who’s worked in writing knows this is madness. I pointed this out. I was told this was the job, and it was subtly implied that perhaps I was somehow not up to a task that wasn’t reasonable in the first place—a task that no one would have been up to. I was flabbergasted and had no idea how to respond. I did the best I could, but under that kind of pressure, and already blind to my own work, the expectation of perfection was essentially impossible.

The situation was a double bind like nothing else I’ve ever experienced, and was how I started to realize I’d landed in an incredibly toxic environment. I was being set up to fail, and being held to a ridiculous standard anyway. Over time, I could see it was endemic—it wasn’t just happening to me.

But in my world, it got weirder. Our office often worked with writing from various higher ups, including those from the president’s office. I was asked to proofread their work, which was all well and good until I’d find something that, shall we say, could have been written better. The first time it happened, I diligently marked the issue and suggested an improvement.

I was told that this administrator’s writing was “very good” and “I think this is okay.” It was not okay. It was a glaringly bad sentence that desperately needed help, because it required the reader to read it twice in order to understand it—the easy hallmark of something that needs to be rewritten. I pointed this out. I may even have pointed out that our job was to save this writer from himself. I was told, again, that it was “fine” and to “leave it.”

I returned to my desk, completely perplexed at how I was meant to do a job, and particularly to do it well, if I was actually not allowed to do the job when it needed to be done. It didn’t matter at all if someone was a “very good writer,” because even “very good writers” need editors, because no writer is perfect.

That’s just not how writing works.

As you may have guessed by now, what I learned, very quickly, was that this was, indeed, how writing worked in this office when it came to certain people, particularly certain people of whom people in my office were afraid. (But not, apparently, afraid of what would happen once those certain people’s bad writing got into the outside world.)

I was also often told that the right word for the job wasn’t the right word; that the almost-right word was the one they wanted; it turned out that they weren’t actually interested in precision of language, and that their definition of perfection was bizarrely situational and dependent on factors I wasn’t privy to and therefore couldn’t comprehend.

What I learned as a result of all these “lessons” is that it is nearly impossible to do a job like editing and proofreading well when you are always forced to second-guess which edits you’ll be allowed to make, and which you won’t—which you should try for, and which you’ll get in trouble for suggesting in the first place…and you are still expected to get it all right all the time.

Photo by Jordyn St. John on Unsplash

Mind-reading was not, as it happens, in the job description. I was not prepared for this. And I certainly was not prepared for what happened to me in the course of attempting to adapt to the insanity of this weirdly perfectionistic environment, which, as I’m sure you can guess by now, just kept getting more and more unreasonable in exciting new ways as time went on.

To top it all off, because of this weird up-is-downism, I felt like the MFA I was so proud of, that I’d worked so hard for, was being eroded out from under me like a sand dune during a hurricane.

The effects of everyday perfectionism

When you spend every day trying to be this perfect person that doesn’t exist, doing perfect things that can’t actually be done, in exchange for a paycheck, you start to lose yourself very quickly. You don’t think you will, because you think it’ll be fine—surely you can pull off this masquerade; it won’t be that big a deal—and you don’t see the change so readily from inside (though you feel it in the physical sensations that you try to ignore—I started to get carpal tunnel very quickly in my right wrist, followed by my left, and ended up having surgery on both within a few years, as just one example).

This stage is also called denial, because you really can’t quite believe that you’re in an environment that could possibly be expecting what it expects of you, or that it could be as bad for you as it’s going to be. No one could honestly expect perfection, right? Because we’re all human, and we all get that humans all make mistakes? Surely this is as obvious as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west? And yet…

You spend so much time being judged harshly that you start to judge yourself more harshly in an attempt to preempt it from others. In other words, you are, completely unknowingly, installing their voices in your head to try to prevent hearing them outside your head, which—when you stop to think about it—is a pretty twisted, if understandable, way of trying to protect yourself. Yale historian of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder calls this “obeying in advance” and advises against it in the face of nascent authoritarian regimes, because it only helps them advance more quickly. If only I’d known that, and made the connection, back then.

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

Once you start to judge yourself more harshly, you pass the gift on to others. Not only are you never good enough, nobody else is, either. It’s not as much fun to be around you, because you’re trying to regain some sort of sense of self—and control—in the worst possible way, because you’re conditioned to it from your environment and you’re desperate for anything that works.

I must emphasize that most of this is unconscious. You don’t notice it sneaking up on you, and you’re not intentionally losing yourself. It just…happens. And it happens slowly, so that you don’t even notice it, until one day you do, and it startles you. Your friends don’t notice it for a while, either, for the same reason.

All of these effects sap the energy out of you, and you end up exhausted. You don’t sleep well, because your stress level is through the roof (which may bring on other fun health issues, like high blood pressure, stress eating, or worse), and you’ve forgotten how to have fun. Creativity doesn’t happen, either, because you’re too stinking tired and you know you couldn’t do a decent job of it, so why bother?

You’re languishing. And you’re probably burned out. (If not, you’re damn close.)

At the core of it all, you’re lost, frustrated, and really, really scared, though the scared part may be buried deeply enough that you’re not consciously aware of it. How did you get here? What the heck has happened to you, and how do you get out of it? All you did was take a job (or start dating, or any number of other situations that could have helped you land here).

I saw even worse things happen to others, too, which I won’t go into here for obvious reasons.

I’m sure you can understand why the tweet below is one of the truest things I’ve ever seen online:

The best advice if you’re in that kind of environment is absolutely to get out.

The second best advice I can give—and the advice that applies even if you’ve managed to get out, because the effects of that kind of perfectionism don’t leave the minute you walk out that door, unfortunately—is to give yourself something to do outside of that environment that gives you life.

The smartest thing I did was to start my podcast, Follow Your Curiosity, in 2018 (it launched in 2019, but I started working on it almost a year earlier).

I’m not kidding when I say it saved my life. I didn’t know it would at the time, but it did. I wasn’t considering taking any drastic measures or anything, fortunately, but it was a light in the tunnel when I really needed one—and when I didn’t expect it to be one. The podcast reminded me of who I was and who I could be, and it was a critical antidote to a lot of the crap I was being told, and expected to be, every day.

What began as a wild idea brewed up in the shower—that great, mystical source of fantastic ideas—turned into something I did entirely on my own that boosted my confidence; was a source of pride, joy, and meaning; and most importantly, was something nobody else could take from me.

The show was the creative project I hadn’t realized I needed, one that armed me with ample evidence to say, “Oh, yeah? You may think you know who/what I am, but you don’t, and I know that for sure, because I do this podcast that reaches people all over the world and talks to cool people about their creative lives and inspires others to do the same…and that’s true no matter what kinds of BS you try to tell me about myself.” It was a bulwark, and it was my secret, because I didn’t advertise it in the office. Heck, no. It wasn’t for them—it was for ME (and my guests and listeners).

That, my friends, is some powerful, powerful mojo.

Is the podcast work? Of course! But it’s also a ton of fun, and has broadened my world in a million ways. And that is a source of energy—an antidote to the exhaustion that creeps in when perfectionism takes over.

If you recognize yourself in any part of this story…

…I want you to know that I created my Make Bad Art course for you.

If you’ve fallen into the trap of perfectionism, it’s robbing you of the joy and creativity that is your birthright as a human being. It makes everything harder than it needs to be and it drains all the color out of life.

Life’s just too short for that, don’t you think?

If you’re not getting to your creative projects because you just can’t seem to get started, that’s a big sign that perfectionism is probably getting in your way.

And if you just need some more play and fun in your life, and get back to the creativity you loved as a kid, Make Bad Art is a great place to do that.

If you want to read more about Make Bad Art, and sign up, all the details are here.

And if you have questions, feel free to leave a comment below, hit reply to this email, or set up a time to talk to me here.

I’ll leave you with this parting thought from the great Anne Lamott:

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird