Divided by zero - Perfectionism

Since my early years, I lived in an environment where the best is meant to survive in the long term. As a child, my French teacher used to punish me for having poor writing by ripping off my paper and telling me to rewrite the texts, which were long and time-consuming by my standards back when I was a kid. Today, my handwriting is beautiful and praised by many, but at what cost?

Perfectionism is something that many artists suffer from. I can’t help it and I have to accept it as being part of my production process, it eventually leads to burnout, which is the cost of wanting to deliver the best of what I can. There are heuristics against it, but if you ask me, despite the outcomes, I like my final products! I like how I keep repairing the damages, fixing the errors, ensuring that what I present to the world is as shiny as what I foresaw during the conception phases. It is, however, interesting that it does not only affect my crafts, it plays a role in my conversations and interactions as well, as I often repeat myself upon wrong pronunciations. It often eats my time and makes me burn extra calories.

I am aware of it as an enemy; it offers the end goal of being satisfied with my output at the cost of my mental health. Had I not submitted to it, you probably would never see most of my works. Sometimes I give up due to technical limitations, though I try my best to achieve results that are "acceptable"". There is also the matter of properly setting goals; as a student, I had to write scientific works, and I always had difficulties determining what the professor is expecting from me in terms of quality. I often hear: “hey, you don’t have to spend that much effort”. The keyword here is “much”; you could say that I did not set a bar here, alas, I wish I received a list of detailed goals to checkmark, I disliked having this freedom in my writings, as it does not allow me to visualize what my person exactly wants quality-wise.

There is also the matter of learning constraints, where I hardly accept skipping the elementary content unless I fully comprehend what’s inside, thinking that I might need to know it in the future pages. I suppose everyone goes through this out of exam-fears.

I never attempted to stop perfectionism, what I do however is slow it down since I am embracing it anyways, as it allows me to see the potential improvements that I can implement. Once I notice a flaw, if it’s not critical, I add it to my to-do list and reserve a week just to make the fixing. Speaking of planning, I get triggered when something outside my influence breaks my plan and causes anomalies in my flow, so there is that as well.

And even when things are fully done and ready for release, there is always a nagging figure that keeps murmuring my head about potential improvements, so I keep pleasing it so to speak. Sometimes this may lead to what people call “Imposter Syndrome”, which doubles as a feeling of loneliness on many occasions.

As a team member, especially if I am in a planning position, my artistic point of view makes it hard for me to be open to suggestions that I deem unoptimized, something which causes me often to be a bad team mate. It becomes a fight where my I have to reduce my ego for the sake of team work. This also challenges my charisma and communication skills.

In terms of interactions, one counter-measure against this quirk is to be honest, since planning conversations in my head tend to lead to some ache in that said head. I generally dislike doing this, but it's what society demands after all. In my experiences, some of my interactions had to be smooth in order to ensure my success. I recall a time where I was in need of some medical attention and being honest was sadly not a good option. Being honest and spelling the truth would surely reduce the complexity of my thinking, it sucks that there exist a set of unseen rules that are perfectionism-intencive, most of which revolve around me needing to fit into a world in order to dwell in these crucial exchanges.

It would be interesting to note though, that I learned about perfectionism as an idea at a very late age. Not only it helped to learn more about it, but I also learned about how some video game designs play encourage it by baiting people with virtual rewards.

When money is brought to a setting where I excel, a new complex dimension gets added to my headaches. I have invested myself in lots of artistic works, digital drawings, writing and painting...etc... I can not recall myself endulging in making a business out of my craft. My awareness on the topic of perfectionism is the bottleneck here, by having to manage and deal with consumers, I would have to actively put myself in burnout in order to satisfy their demands and surpass their expectations -Note that I used the word surpass not meet- and let's not forget the invisible rivaly that I would have to fight through. Instead, I would prefer to participate in these endevours by ignoring the money factor. Like so, I have the full control over my activity, and I allow myself to make the minor mistakes, or in other words: I would do things while wanting to do them and not because I have to. By expecting monetary return, I might become a pleaser, and the perfectionism devil would love it. It is natural for any business owner or employee to do their best in order to keep the cash flow running, I can fully understand the mechanics of being part of this cycle, unless the person does not care about what they offer to the rest of the world, perfectionism in this regard is quite hard to manage, especially under inflation.

Taking long breaks between each major output is essential for my recovery, without it, I would not have the energy to craft further. Not taking breaks has major negative consequences on the quality of my next output. There is also the matter of working on only 2 projects max at a time because having more can also lead to potential burnout, especially since perfectionism is on my side here.
To this very day, I still question my French teacher’s behavior, I am overall thankful that my hands were trained to write nice and cursive text, which extended to me being capable of nicely drawing. I am aware that her and my people had pure intentions, some say that they also had the same circumstances or lived lives they didn’t want their children to experience. At the end of the day, I partially do this to impress, as my creations act as a positive feedback gateway to satisfy my ego, knowing fully that what I made deserves the praise it keeps getting. Nevertheless, I will continue striving to reach greater heights. If you ever catch a mistake of mine, I will always respond with: "To err is human!".