Does Depression Make You An Unfair Perfectionist?
There’s a lot of people out there who suffer from depression, and all kinds of effects it can bring into your life. When you go through a symptom list, because you’re sure what you’re feeling isn’t normal, but you haven’t quite worked yourself up to see a doctor yet, you can identify with at least three or four of them: constantly being in a low mood, having little to no self esteem, losing all motivation you used to have for your life, etc etc.
At one point, you can start to tell it’s depression, because you’ve felt this way for at least a couple of weeks by now, with no change to your mood, and no hope in your heart for your future mood either. You just can’t drag yourself out of what seems to be a hole only you’ve fallen in, whilst the friends you were out walking with just continue on without you, happily laughing and chatting amongst themselves.
Of course, you’re not going to be the only person suffering from depression when it comes to your social circle, and reaching out is more important right now than it has ever been before — remember that! But that just seems to be another symptom of depression, doesn’t it? You feel like you’re not worthy enough to reach out, that what you’re suffering from just isn’t bad enough, and you get angry at yourself for not being able to handle it.
And that, I feel, is where perfectionism goes hand in hand with a depressed mind and body.
Perfectionism, at its definition, is a personality trait that makes us strive for flawlessness in all that we do. We set high standards for every single day when we get out of bed, and if we don’t meet them, we often get down and out about it. We can use these missed expectations as lessons for the future, and learn from the ‘mistakes’ we made today, but that’s hard to do. After all, you’re in your feelings for the time being, you’re looking at where you went wrong, and what you could do better; and you’re probably not being too nice to yourself about it. So you see, it’s hard to drag your head out of a self-deprecating circle like that, especially when you’re running around it at least twice a week.
But depression makes us dwell on everything we’ve done wrong in our life, and it makes us hesitant to reach out for opportunities in the future. It makes us feel guilty about even the smallest of mistakes, like missing an alarm or forgetting to text someone back immediately, and it stops us in our tracks whenever we try to move on from the many little mistakes literally everyone in the world will make throughout the day. They’re normal, they don't really mean anything in the long run, but depression makes us beat ourselves up about it.
Depression turns you into your own worst critic.
It can often lead to people hating themselves and what they do, but it doesn’t provide you with ways to get yourself out of that low mood you’ve been forced into. It doesn’t give you the tools to help yourself like yourself again, and feel good about what you can do in the future — at least, not without a little help.
And when you’re a creative person, your mind can go down some very dark paths. It takes you by the hand and forces you to stumble along with it, with no direction to follow or end in sight. It takes the things you’ve made, the work you’ve done, and pinpoints every single flaw that could be present. And more often than not, those flaws don’t even exist.
So what can you do? When depression takes that perfectionist part that lives inside all of us and cranks it up to an unfair volume of 11?
I’m not a doctor myself, so I can’t recommend any kind of treatment, and I’m not going to. But usually, via the use of counselling, maybe mixed with some kind of short term prescription medication, we can help pave the way back to having a healthy mind that we feel happy and comfortable with. Methods like these give us the energy, and the tools, to work with our behaviours and to change our thought processes. It’s half the fight right there.
But the journey doesn’t stop there, does it? Anyone who has a history with depression knows it’s quite an uphill climb, and every so often there’s a chance you’re going to fall back down the slope a little ways. You’re going to find yourself in moments where you’re paralyzed with fear over your seeming inability to do anything right and up to standard, and so you don’t do anything. You don’t go out to see your friends, because they seem to be better than you. You keep your head down at work, because what’s going on in your mind makes you too exhausted to take on anything except the hours in the day.
Similarly, you’re going to find yourself in other moments where you’ve let yourself be vulnerable with your creativity, only to find yourself disappointed by the result of your labour. And if you’re ever letting yourself walk into your office or your studio with those self-defeating thoughts in your head already, there’s a good chance you’ll only have a self-fulfilling prophecy to work with.
So you’ve got to start putting a few of those helpful techniques you’ve learned into practice, and on a regular basis. Maybe you heard about something that works from a close friend, maybe a doctor is encouraging you to try something — give it a chance and see how it goes for you. Perfectionism tries to stop us in these moments too, you know, so it’s nice to take a stand against the ideas of failure that are doing their best to overwhelm you. Trust me, any method that aims to help you pull yourself out of a depressive spiral is worth the time and energy.
You’ve got to learn how to cope with your own low moods, which is going to take lots of time and commitment. You’ve got to learn, when you’re in those moments where you’re staring at something you’ve written or something you’ve painted and you find yourself hating everything about it, how to take a step back and think, ‘Do I need to hate this?’
Hopefully, at some point in a couple of months time, you’re going to be able to answer that question with a no.
That’s the main goal in your life for now, isn’t it? If you’re someone who makes money off the things you create with your own hands, or if you’re someone whose whole life has revolved around the artistic visions you have in your head, you want to love what you do again, more than anything.
So, can you stop being your own worst critic? If you want the short answer: Yes. If you’re more one for the long and properly detailed answer: Yes, but it’s going to take a long time, and it’s never going to stop being hard work. You probably won’t be able to do it alone, but who’s to say? Most of all, it’s simply enough that you’re trying.
