On Perfectionism and Pain

When Needing to Do Everything Right Starts to Feel Wrong

You know those moments in movies when, after a long struggle, the protagonist finally puts all the pieces together and figures everything out? There’s always a closeup on his face as it clicks.

He was Keyser Söze.

I’ve been dead the whole time.

The call is coming from inside the house.

Those moments happen in real life too. Mine came during a conversation with my mother. But first, some context.

Starting at around age six, I had ongoing intestinal issues. (No one said this was going to be pleasant context.) I would often get what I called bad stomach aches, but was actually colitis. My pediatrician put me on a bland diet and a viscous medication that tasted like cherry kerosene with a splash of demon urine.

This went on for a few years, after which I stopped taking the medicine; I hear the FDA has since reached a deal with Sherwin-Williams to re-brand it as an industrial lacquer. (In case it’s not clear, I did not care for it.) My stomach would still hurt periodically, but it was manageable. In fact, along with an obsession with Batman and an allergy to penicillin, searing abdominal pain is one of my most foundational holdovers from childhood.

As is a tendency to obsess. At about the same age, I set myself a simple goal. So simple, in fact, that it always confused me why more people didn’t do it. I wanted to be the best. At everything.

To be clear, my “everything” pretty much consisted of school.

I was not, and never would be, the fastest, strongest, or most coordinated athlete, and I could live with that. I also wasn’t a precocious pageant kid, do-si-do-ing around a stage in a little cowboy outfit to “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”

I was, however, a very good student. One area where I particularly shined was spelling, which, for some reason, became a matter of life and death to me. I absolutely needed to get 100 on every spelling test. Because if I didn’t, who would I be? Just another snot-encrusted first-grader getting his letters all jumbled up like a fucking simpleton? Please.

But accuracy wasn’t enough. I also craved speed. Not only did I need to get every question right, I needed to be the first one to finish every test. Because if I didn’t, who would I be? Just another plodding nose-picker who took the entire period to answer a couple pages’ worth of rudimentary questions? Come on.

Eventually, my desire for dominance spread to all of my subjects. I gotta do it fast, and everything’s gotta be right. All right? All right.

Let me spell it out for you—which I can, because I’m really fucking good at spelling: In the classroom, I was not to be bested.

Naturally, I was bested sometimes. I wasn’t superhuman. (Not like now.) And when that happened, I’d beat myself up like Edward Norton in Fight Club. I always strove to be a little smarter, a little faster, a little…perfecter.

A Gut Feeling

Decades later, I was having lunch with my mom when the subject of my wonky colon came up. (I wish I could remember what we were eating.)

“I used to worry about you so much,” she said. “I would tell you that you don’t have to do everything perfectly. Just do your best.”

The camera starts slowly zooming in.

“Eventually, we scheduled a meeting with your teacher because we thought she may have been pressuring you.”

The camera zooms tighter.

“It turned out that she was worried too. She thought we were pressuring you.”

The camera zooms tighter still.

“So, the only one pressuring you was you. You were literally making yourself sick trying to be perfect”

Closeup of my face as it finally clicks.

The call is coming from inside the house!

It was staggering.

This perfectionism thing had been a problem my entire life, as had my stomach issues. Yet it never occurred to me that they might be related. And I’m supposed to be smart?

Even worse, like my teacher, I figured my parents had drilled the perfectionism into me. I never dreamed that I was actually just hardwired that way. Evidently I slid out of the birth canal like, “You had nine months to train, dipshit. If you’d kept your arms and legs straighter, you could have shaved at least 0.7 seconds off your time.”

Now, as my mom mentioned, she’d tried to explain all this to me when I was six, but no doubt I was too busy fretting over how to spell “lunatic” for it to register.

Of course, perfectionism can be an asset too. After the rigors of first grade, I continued to do well in school. I’ve excelled at work even when my heart wasn’t really in it. I still can’t fold a fitted sheet to save my life, but my sock drawer is a neatly color-coordinated thing of beauty.

One of the downsides is that my colon has continuously attacked me like I’m behind in my gambling debts. In later years, my brain got into the act, as congenital perfectionism contributed to depression and anxiety.

It’s fair to say that, much like Robert De Niro, perfectionism is responsible for both many amazing and dreadful experiences in my life.

At this point, I’ve learned to tame it. I’ve discovered that not every situation calls for it, and frankly, it’s rarely appreciated the way it should be anyway. (Sometimes, it actually pisses people off.) In certain situations, there is such a thing as “good enough,” a concept I used to find utterly offensive.

It’s a much more serene way to live.

But if you’ve spotted any spelling mistakes here, please don’t tell me. I couldn’t take it.