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 churlish 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 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 more fairly have 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, currying favour 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
than 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 labouring 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 deserved to be accepted from the start
and that it cannot forever be our fault in our minds that we were 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 a 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
at the outset accept us for who we were without a surfeit of trophies and prizes.