How to be less perfectionist
One way perfectionism shows up for me is the “I’m worried I’m not good enough and everyone will find out” problem. In this post, I want to explore how authenticity might be just the medicine us perfectionists need.
Perfectionism is a shield that prevents us from being seen.
Perfectionism is a survival strategy. It keeps us feeling safe, even at the expense of meaningful connections with others and ultimately ourselves. It’s an unconscious lens through which we interact with the world.
Somewhere along the line, we learned that it wasn’t okay to be us. That we need to control, even to manipulate, and present the right version of ourselves. That we needed to manage the experience of others so they wouldn’t see past the veneer.
Perfectionism leaves no space for the raw, unfiltered, artless qualities of genuine authenticity. It assumes that even just being can be studied, improved, perfected. And it determines the measure of one’s goodness and value by how thoroughly and tirelessly you seek to be better.
It is an exhausting and perpetually disappointing way to live: the work is never good enough and the job is never done. There is always room for improvement.
The paradox of perfectionism is that its pursuit does not lead to a fuller, more rich, and rewarding existence. It simply eats away at your innate wisdom and truth, creates emptiness, and reduces you to a project without a timeline. Perfectionism is a trap. It gets in the way of us deeply knowing ourselves, our needs, our desires, and our intuition. It’s a barrier to connecting fully with another human being. It keeps us from one of the most basic things we desire as human beings — connection.
Perfectionism is a trap that authenticity can open.
Perfectionism is fear. Fear of not being enough. Fear of being rejected for who we are. Fear of being the only one who’s still figuring it out and f**king it up. Perfectionism is fear and authenticity is courage.
It’s the courage to let go of what others think, celebrate our quirks, and welcome our imperfections. It’s brave to allow ourselves to be vulnerable and to be fully seen by others. Hell, it takes guts to drop out of our heads and feel our own bodies, hear our own heartbeats, and connect with our own intuition — because what if it says something I don’t want to hear?!
Authenticity is freedom. Learning to be true to ourselves, to dance to our own beat, is liberating.
And have you ever considered the possibility that other people love you for exactly who you are truly are? That people want to get to know the real you, not the masks you wear. That your genuine, authentic, raw presence is a gift that other people don’t simply tolerate but deeply desire in their own lives.
I don’t believe that perfectionism is a choice. I believe it’s a compulsion, an addiction, a trauma pattern.
So there’s no point saying “just stop”, “just be okay making mistakes”, “perfection is unattainable so stop trying so hard”. To do something different, we need to learn a new way of being.
We have to practice showing up. To make the choice to be authentic over and over and over again. We can choose to let ourselves be seen. It takes courage, strength, and commitment — luckily, skills recovering perfectionists have in spades. The art, therefore, is channeling those capacities away from hiding and controlling towards allowing and being open.
If any of this resonates or you have questions, please get in touch.
Originally published at https://vixanderton.com on October 28, 2021.
