A Spell Against Perfectionism

Perfectionism, or the pursuit of perfection, is all about disconnection. It can be fairly easy to identify which parts of your life are warped by this pursuit. The obvious areas can include: your career, your creative pursuits, your body/image/appearance, your relationship/marriage. "Just write something amazing!" we tell ourselves. Nothing at all is written. "Just have a perfect relationship!" The relationship, being a constantly changing, lived experience between two different people, laughs in your face. "Just be skinny!" we exhort ourselves. Our body floats away from us: we examine it. It becomes a thing to examine, not the luscious animal that we are.

Many of us may be plagued by this pursuit in these areas of our lives. We are encouraged to, after all. We are rewarded for our perfectionism in the workplace; as women, we are more demanded than rewarded to look perfect. 

We need to work on these things, obviously. We need to try our best to unlearn the throaty whisper of society telling us to be pretty, thin, hard-working to the point of sacrifice/death, married, babied. We must try to divorce our real value from these things. 

I'm more interested in the subtler forms of perfectionism and how they hold us back from living. In my experience, perfectionism clogs; it refuses movement; it turns away from possibility. If perfectionism hangs over not only our more tangible areas of life but also the less tangible, it can be even harder to spot. Your relationships may feel stuck, perhaps because you are unable to see outside of the succeed/fail binary you are adhering to. The problem with the idea of 'perfection' is that it assumes that life freezes in place at the moment of success/perfection. We can never have a 'perfect' relationship for many reasons, but mostly because relationships are movement. Relationships can oscillate between feeling stale, invigorating, isolating, intimate, and back again, sometimes in the span of a few days. All we ever have is the moment when we are relating together, every moment that we relate together, and what cocktail of mood, experiences, and emotions that we are showing up as at that instant. 

Another subtle form comes about when we demand perfection from our character. This type is all the more slippery, as evaluating something like 'morals' or 'character' is like counting rings on the trunk of an imaginary tree. Here again, the impossible standard stops us from being in life. It takes us out of life; we watch ourselves perform character and morals. We are removed from life, from ourselves, from others. Where this can be especially pernicious, in my experience, is when trying to involve oneself in social justice movements. My perfectionism stops me from actually getting involved in any one group or specific task; I warily sift through dozens of opportunities, waiting and waiting for the 'perfect' one to emerge. Why register voters when I could write op-eds? Why write op-eds when I could march in the street? Why march in the street when I could ______________: the list goes on. In searching for that golden, lustrous opportunity, not only am I actually distancing myself from real live people, I'm also positioning myself as more deserving. It's as if I'm telling myself that my activism will be extraordinary; that I deserve the most interesting tasks; that I should be at 'the center' of movements. This pursuit of 'specialness' distorts. It removes. It disconnects. I scroll and scroll, feeling helpless.

As a human, I feel responsible not only to scoop myself out of this binaried exactitudery so that I can be a more present, loving, honest person, but also to help cast a hex against the wider White settler perfectionist mentality that freezes and mutes possibilities and movement. Whiteness keeps us from _______. Whiteness stunts. Whiteness wants us to be stuck, comfortable, and distracted by our own specialness.

A spell against perfectionism:
A heart of cabbage
An ear of corn
Over-steeped tea
An exploded computer
I dunno what else actually.