When you stop taking chances you stay where you sit / you won’t live any longer but it’ll feel like it – U2 “Summer Rain”
Sometimes, when I stop and think about it, I realize that a lot of my mental problems come not from depression or anxiety but from a little trait often used positively on my resume: perfectionism. I realize that my inability to meet the impossible standards I set for myself causes me to be depressed, to have feelings of worthlessness and despair. My anxious thoughts often revolve around how I will orchestrate any given situation to show me and my family in the best light, or I obsess over how things could have been different if I had just been a little bit better. It is so difficult for me to admit that I am wrong, or that I need help, that I often choose to quit rather than ask a question or work to fix a mistake. The problem with my perfectionism isn’t so much that I want things to be right; it’s that, because of it, I believe that no one will love me unless they are. All evidence to the contrary, I remain convinced that I must prove my worth to people by giving them a good show. Perfectionism keeps my home as clean as possible (with a two year old), my hands busy with one project after another, my schedule full of insignificant tasks so that I am always just too busy to help out in a sticky situation or take on something new that might not work out, and it keeps my mind in a constant state of doubt about whether or not everything I do will ever be enough, if the real me, the one I am discovering, will ever be enough.
Anne Lamott says this in her book Bird By Bird:
“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 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 more fun while they’re doing it. … Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground – you can still discover new treasure under all those piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things up, get a grip. Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it is going to get. Tidiness makes me thing of held breath, of suspended animation …. [She describes how muscles cramp around a wound to protect the injured area] I think that something similar happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around out wounds – the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both – to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don’t even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us. … They keep us standing back or backing away from life in a naked and immediate way. … It’s easier if you believe in God. … Now it might be that your God is an uptight, judgmental perfectionist, sort of like Bob Dole, or for that matter, me. But a priest friend of mine has cautioned me away from the standard God of our childhoods, who loves and guides you and then, if you are bad, roasts you: God as high school principal in a gray suit who never remembered your name but is always leafing unhappily through your files. If this is your God, maybe you need to blend in the influence of someone who is ever so slightly more amused by you, someone less anal. David Byrne is good for instance. Gracie Allen is good. Mr. Rogers will work. …”
She has it right. Somewhere in my irrational brain I really do believe that if I had stepped carefully enough, made all the right choices and never disappointed anyone, I would have come to this point in my life unscathed. And maybe, if I can work even harder now to avoid making mistakes, I can somehow atone for the ones that I have already made. So I tiptoe through my life, trying not to bump anything, making sure I don’t get too close to anything or anyone because, in my clumsiness, I might hurt them or myself.
One of the worst parts of perfectionism is the knowledge, hidden carefully away from everyone, that we are never good enough. That there is this messy, uncertain, incompetent person just waiting for the veneer to slip so that they can pop out and humiliate us. This knowledge leads us to live in fear of even the smallest failing. So we avoid any possibility of showing our faults to the world. But we have missed the big E on the eye chart. People notice that we never confide in them, that we hold parts of ourselves back, protecting the part that is already broken, clenching our muscles around the very part that needs room to heal. They notice that my house might look great, but I have a hard time hosting big groups because of the anticipation of the mess they will leave or the fear that people won’t have a good time. They notice that I hover over my son, shielding him from anything that might make people wonder if I am a good parent or not. They notice that I don’t eat a lot in public, but I am still carrying extra weight. They notice these things and they wonder what I am hiding. They wonder if anything that I say is true, if I can be trusted with the knowledge of their imperfections and insecurities. They see the poorly mended cracks in my life and decide that I am not strong enough to help them carry the weight of their burdens. And the best of friends float farther apart on the sea of secrets and distrust.
I have a really hard time letting go of things that happened a long time ago. My therapist once told me that I needed to learn to forgive my teenage self. She asked me how I would feel if I walked in to a room and saw my teenage self sitting on a couch, saw the desperate longing for acceptance and love, the constant scheming and hoping to get what she wanted; would I want to smack some sense in to her or would I want to hug her and tell her that it was going to be okay? I know that I want to hug the teenage girls that I know today. That I want to tell them that things will get better. That they will get to know themselves and that what they find out won’t kill them. That the things which are so consuming and important right now will – really – not matter very much in ten years. I can see how desperate they are for attention and acceptance and my heart aches as I watch them stumble through their days trying not to knock anything over. I feel compassion for them. But I still want to smack the girl that I was. I still want to shake her and scream at her, telling her that she should have known better. She should have seen that those cool kids would never let her in to their group, that she was just wasting her time trying to get him to notice her and that once he did, he would use her and then throw her aside for another, prettier, skinnier girl. I want to tell her that reliving these mistakes ten or twelve years later will rob her of opportunities for real intimacy and that she must learn to see them for what they are, mistakes. Even though some of them will leave permanent scars, they will also help her make the transition from girl to woman. That they are not indicative of a life full or failures, but rather that they are the times when she messed up and that messing up is okay. But I can’t, because when I try to get over my regrets now I don’t see them as dumb choices by a kid who didn’t know any better, I see them as permanent marks on my record, as F’s on the big report card of my life.
Perfectionism keeps me from trying anything. The fear of failure is enough to keep me from learning new skills, really working on losing weight, getting off of anti-depressants, or ever thinking about going back to work. Something in my brain is convinced that it would be worse to try these things and have it not work out than to stay where I am, wanting more - but safe. I remember at the beginning of our recovery group someone said, “The reason I am scared to embark on this journey is because I am convinced that if this doesn’t work, nothing will.” And now, almost 3 years in to it, I look at where I am and I wonder; it is working? I can safely say that it isn’t working the way I wanted it to work. I figured by now I would be a skinny, cheerful mom who doesn’t even think about that box of Oreos, taunting her from the store shelf. I am not there. I thought I would be a confident, passionate wife. One who finds her worth apart from her husband, who is free enough to release him from the responsibility of keeping her happy and safe, whose frailties do not influence every decision that we make as a family. That is not me. I thought I would be one of those sassy, hip mommas that can juggle a toddler, look forward to another baby on the way, and carry two bags of groceries and a coffee drink without anyone starting to scream. Most days I am lucky to take a shower before noon, much less leave the house. And every time my son starts to scream, my knee-jerk reaction is to join right in. Immediately my mind jumps to the assumption that the process has failed. That I have failed. That I will never be well and that things will never be fixed.
But then I am reminded that the point of the recovery process is to change these patterns of thinking. To learn to see a bigger picture and not focus so much on the minutiae that only drags me down. So I wonder if the fact that I have learned how to be a better friend, a quiet observer, a listener, and an asker of questions is a sign that the process is working. I recall that it is, after all, called a process not an instant switch or overnight change. That if I believe what I say I believe, then God is not unaware of my problems and His plan includes the solutions to those problems – even if the solution is none at all. Crazy thoughts come in to my head; they say that maybe God isn’t a High School Principal. Maybe He is a Father. One who looks at us and sees children whom He loves. He sees us trying to accomplish seemingly simple tasks, like getting dressed, and He sees us botch them up again and again. And so He looks down on His children, His messy children with one sock hanging off their ear and both legs in the same pant leg. He sees us struggling to put on our own shirts and screaming as we push our heads deeper and deeper in to the sleeve. He sees us fall over and flop around on the floor, stuck in the mess we have created for ourselves and he doesn’t ridicule us for our ineptitude or get frustrated that we are messing up His schedule, rather He wipes a tear of mirth from His eye and says, “Come here, sweetheart. Let me help you.”
Now if I can only stop expecting perfection from my own child, maybe I will be able to believe that God might not expect it from me.
