there is a kind of person who seems at first glance to benefit from an admirable degree of self-motivation thoroughness and drive they are up at dawn they rarely take holidays they are always sneaking in an extra hour or two of work their bosses are highly impressed they are constantly promoted their grades have been excellent since primary school they never miss an appointment or turn in a piece of work that is less than stellar we like to say that such a person has high standards we might even anoint them with the term perfectionist it might seem
chillish to locate any problems here why complain about a somewhat overzealous devotion to perfection in a troubled and lackadaisical world there could surely be nothing too awful about high exactitude what could be so imperfect about perfectionism the concern is not so much with the work of the perfectionist its recipients are in a very privileged position as with the state of their soul perfectionism does not tragically spring first and foremost from any kind of love of perfection in and of itself it has its origins in a far more regrettable feeling of never being good enough it
is rooted in self-hatred sparked by memories of being disapproved of or neglected by those who should have more fairly esteemed us warmly in childhood we become perfectionists from a primary sense of being unworthy uninteresting flawed a disappointment a letdown a nuisance so powerful is this sense so appalling is it in its pressure on our psyches we are prepared to do more or less anything to expunge it working at all hours carrying favor with authority doing twice as much as the next person these are the tools with which we seek to cleanse our apparently shamefully undeserving
selves one part of the mind promises the other that the completion of the next challenge will finally usher in peace we can be very good at pretending that our ambitions are sane but our work has a sisyphean dimension no sooner have we rolled our working boulder up the hill then it will tumble back down again there is never going to be a point of rest or a lasting feeling of completion we are in truth ill rather than driven we aren't interested in perfect work at all we are trying to escape from a feeling of being
awful people and work simply happens to be the medium through which we are striving to grow tolerable in our own eyes but because our problem didn't begin with work nor can work ever prove the solution our real goal is not as we think to be an ideal employee or professional it is to feel acceptable but responsibility for a sense of acceptance cannot be handed over to our bosses or customers or a ceaselessly demanding capitalist system these will never let us rest easy because it is in their nature without any evil intent always to demand more
we need to shift our sense of where our drive is coming from we are not unnaturally interested in working perfectly we are laboring under an unusually intense impression that we are dreadful people a problem for which working harder cannot be the answer we need to allow ourselves to imagine that we deserve to be accepted from the start and that it cannot forever be our fault in our minds that we are not it is not up to us to try to prove that we have a right to exist it is asking too much of ourselves to
have to experience a referendum on our legitimacy every time we hand in a report every exam we have to pass every customer we have to serve working well is naturally an admirable goal but it becomes a symptom of mental perturbation when it becomes the cover for a secret aspiration to correct a deficit of early love we should welcome an ability to tolerate periods of laziness not because we are congenitally idle but because it is a sign that we have learnt to speak more kindly to ourselves and to be appropriately angry with those who could not
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