13 Jan 2022
I find myself starting a bunch of things, but never following through or showing anyone. It’s like I hold myself back from pursuing something I enjoy, even if I enjoy it a lot. I also am deathly afraid of putting myself and my work out there. It’s a mix of many complex emotions that I’ve yet to unfurl. A recent breakthrough has slightly raised the veil and so I feel compelled to write about it and share.
Institutions in our life incentivize us to be perfect. School makes us go through standardize testing (even learning an art like piano does this too, which I find slightly ironic), and knowledge work banks on the output being perfect. Both of these take up so much of our lives and really ingraines the idea that perfection is the way to go always. If you’re not perfect, you’re not doing things right. It’s alright to progress and learn along the way (school is designed for learning, and work should be failsafe enough to tolerate learning), but perfection is expected by the deadline (A+ on the test, or a bulletproof product/script/etc).
I think Christianity deals with this in a pretty rough way. “We are all sinners” + “Strive to be Christ-like” + “Only God can forgive sin” create an odd environment where it’s hard to find a sense of Self. And definitely perpetuates the whole “You gotta be perfect” mindset. More on this in a later post… probably.
This pervasive perfecionist mindset has intruded on my video games. After consuming so much top-level gaming content around being “optimal” and analysis… it’s been tough for me to sit through my own gameplay, knowing how bad it is compared to the content I consume (ie the “taste” I’ve curated).
Being perfect is heavily rewarded operating in various systems, but how does it help outside of them? This is something to ask yourself. I find that it is detrimental to me finding and being myself, and yet unfortunately it’s so natural for me to apply. It’s something I gotta unlearn in order to (1) be okay with who I am, (2) continue to find who I am, and (2) express outwardly who I am.
A common mantra against the feeling of mediocrity is “Even the best start from nothing”, “Everyone starts somewhere” and the like, but that doesn’t address the looming unspoken truth that I probably will never be perfect. (Either this truth, or the other More Realistic truth that it will take a seemingly insurmountable amount of effort to get to “the closest to perfection a human can get”, both of which are scary).
To a “perfectionist” (or “someone who grew up striving for perfection in the above institutions”), that shit hurts and something that I will never want to face.
To this I propose a new way to frame this: embrace the imperfection. Blatantly stolen from this great vid by Visa, it approaches things from where we are right now – imperfect beings, rather than looking top-down (ex “to become Really Good a.k.a. the-closest-to-perfection-a-human-can-get, you must start from 0”). It’s more comforting, actionable, and realistic.
Imperfection comes to define the human being – if we were perfect, we’d be robots (to be overly reductive about it for the sake of dramaticism). We’d also be missing out on things like Emotions and stuff, which are pretty sweet, and pretty core to the Human Experience. (One could argue emotions are a very good solution to an agent society with imperfect information, and not quite borne of “human imperfection”, but let’s roll with it. It's easy to attribute emotions == imperfection because they are generally "not optimal" / "flawed", but that equality is not what I'm highlighting).
In my case, the Learned Perfectionism manifests itself as a fear of judgement, which casts paralysis on anything I want to share with people. It sucks. It’s a bit ironic that this fear (borne out of human’s imperfection) to share my imperfect work is something I should be embracing, not just the fact that my work is imperfect.
So, I gotta unlearn the perfectionism drilled into my brain. Up until now, I thought I had an unshakeable inability to commit myself to doing something, and I grew increasingly frustrated with myself. Why couldn’t I Just Do? Why does everything I produce suck? It was demoralizing knowing I couldn’t even stick to one thing. Turns out, a lot of this is perfectionism + fear of being judged. Also, vague sweeping self-judgements that were unfair to me.
Thanks for reading my imperfect post :P