My Life As A Recovering Perfectionist

I distinctly remember one visit to a grade school friend’s house. My friend and I were both seven or eight years old. I was there to work on a project for school, after which we planned to watch TV and do whatever seven year olds like to do when they hang out at their friend’s houses.

As we finished up our school project, we were packing our notebooks into our backpacks, and my friend’s mom remarks, “look how organized Katie is!” — the implication being that my friend was not organized and should take note of how to be more like me. I’m sure she loved this comment from her mother, but being seven or eight, she probably forgot about it two minutes later. I did not forget, though.

Even at a young age, I couldn’t understand how my classmates lost pens and pencils, misplaced their homework, or confused “you’re” with “your.” My class notes were immaculate. In fact, if I misspelled something in my notes, it wasn’t uncommon for me to rip the page out of the notebook and recopy everything I’d written up until the egregious spelling error. You could say I was pretty anal about spelling and grammar.

This caused a lot of stress, though I wouldn’t have called it “stress” at the time. I just thought there was a right and wrong way of doing things, and if you weren’t going to be right (read: perfect)… what was the point?

This also made me a bit of an annoying know-it-all.

At some point in my high school career, I decided that it was no longer cool to be that perfect and nerdy. In an attempt to fit in, I adopted a “fuck it” attitude to hide my perfectionist tendencies. This actually did nothing to change my desire to be perfect at everything, but it made it easier for me to brush off minor missteps that would have earned me an internal tongue-lashing in years prior.

They say that women are more self-critical than men; that we hold ourselves to unrealistically high standards and find it hard to accept when we don’t uphold those standards. I can attest to this.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m female, or because I’m crazy, or some combination of both; but for whatever reason, I’ve battled perfectionism for most of my life, and the battle has been perfectly imperfect.

It’s held me back from trying new things, for fear of not being a natural. In high school, I made the varsity lacrosse team and volunteered to play JV instead because I wasn’t sure I could hold my own with the upperclassmen. I was terrified of being the worst player on the team.

Perfectionism caused me to waste three (miserable) years before signing up for my personal training certification course, despite hating my desk job, because I was afraid I wouldn’t be taken seriously as a strength coach. Perfectionism held me back from starting my fitness company because I was afraid I didn’t know enough about business or marketing to attract clients and actually make money doing what I love.

In a way, perfectionism has affected my ability to meet people and make friends because I’m afraid of looking like a fool or letting people see the imperfect (yet real) version of myself.

I’ve learned the hard lesson that imperfect action beats the hell out of perfect plans that never gets implemented.

Perfection is unattainable. The desire for perfection is actually based in fear. Action is the antidote to fear. More often than not, you can look back at something that terrified you and say, “you know, that wasn’t as terrible as I made it out to be in my head.”

Living in Colorado has afforded me the opportunity to try a lot of new activities, one of which is rock climbing. When climbing, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. You can slip and fall; a hold that looks excellent from below can turn out to be nothing. But you’ll never summit if you don’t let go of secure handholds and footholds and stretch yourself for the next purchase. It’s cheesy, but it’s true.

Perhaps the hardest lesson I’ve learned in my adult life is to pursue progress, rather than perfection.

Worrying about being “perfect” doesn’t get you anywhere in life.

Nobody is perfect — nope, not even you. You never will be. And that’s okay.

Let go of the secure handhold and reach out for the next one, even if you have to hang onto it by your fingertips and scramble like mad for a better hold.

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