Issue #56: Belonging and Perfectionism

"Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being." — John Updike

Photo by Eran Menashri on Unsplash

Two weeks, I lived through a perfectionist’s worst nightmare: an unavoidable negative consequence not of my making. I tested positive for COVID. Confronting a present of thankfully minor symptoms and a future of unknown and uncertain potential health complications brought a range of thoughts to mind, not least of which how immediately and intensely I blamed myself and how long that feeling lingered. It was an unexpectedly emotional experience.

I’ve referred to myself as a recovering perfectionist but those stickler waters run deep. Despite all of individual measures of mitigation I took being triple vaxxed and wearing KN95 masks since August, it turns out that it’s difficult to outfox the systemic failure of the abdication of legal, ethical and moral authority of the US government.

During a marathon of Harry Potter movies, I started thinking about how the relationship of perfectionism and belonging. While we are no strangers to discussion of perfectionism in the media, it’s often discussed as an individual mindset and failing that can be solved with a lot of discipline of attention, rhetoric and emotional regulation. But much like belonging is an individual need filled collectively, perfectionism is an individual perspective created and reinforced culturally.

Perfectionism is a form of control for the messiness and uncertainty of life that requires individuals to exempt themselves from the need for fallibility, thereby exempting themselves from a quality required for being human. Although there’s an underlying belief that perfectionism protects us, we need the learning that can come from failure as well as the added push for us to seek relationships with others that precipitate learning from failure.

Perfectionism in the collective relies on separation and performance for the control that can come from holding power. You build and maintain a facade at all costs, preventing yourself from being seen and making shallow connections based on lies. Your performance of perfectionism becames the measure of success. For cultural or collective perfectionism, society both creates and rewards what is perfect while eliminating or denigrating anything else. In an Oprah Daily interview done with Brene Brown, she shared the following about the cultural impact of perfectionistic cultures:

BB: I do all this leadership work in organizations where people don’t get that relationship [with shame and perfectionism] and intentionally build perfectionistic cultures. And then they say: “There’s no innovation or creativity. What’s going on?” Well, shame kills creativity and innovation; perfectionism is a defense mechanism against shame. If I look perfect, I can avoid or minimize shame, judgment, and blame.

Culturally, perfectionism manifests as erasure and othering — all modes of shame, judgment, and blame. The backlash of book banning and anti-CRT bills has been bewildering both for the ignorance, hatred and the hypocrisy. Countless totalitarianian regimes have followed the playbook of erasing history to fit whatever propagandist fantasy justifies their thirst for power, robbing the broader population of sense making capabilities. They always other a scapegoated population in an effort to burnish the egos of their ingroup, and destabilize a sense of safety and comfort by normalizing relationships to police others rather than witness their authenticity. But we would be misguided if we only focused on the performative appeasement and ego-serving separation while underweighting the violence of “well-intentioned” boosterism.

I saw a tweet that pithly captures my… exasperation? frustration? desperation? … from all of this trauma. While I lost track of the original tweet, it said something to the effect of self care is great but what I really need is someone to respond logically and humanely to the trauma happening to and around us. Our mainstream perfectionist culture is dysfunctional because the response to collective trauma is the invalidation of gaslight-y apathy to human suffering while celebrating corporate success and toxic positivity. Cultural apathy kills the soul, forcing people who are struggling with issues of life and death to hide them. Unfortunately, cultural apathy also sustains itself in the structural cowardice of institutions and systems overindexing on “neutrality” on top of already biased systems to avoid accountability for creating and rewarding the perfectionism that caused the original trauma.

In that same Oprah interview, Brown shares the following insight from her recent book on emotions, Atlas of the Heart: “If we don’t understand our own emotional landscapes, we cannot build a culture of connection.” I don’t know much as interventions to undo collectivism or cultural perfectionism. But it seems like we need to understand our country’s emotional landscape of grief, rage, despair, and hatred before we can change the culture, face the truth of institutional and societal fallibility, and create spaces and structures for the dismantling of systems that turn a blind eye to fallibility.

---

I am excited to share that I am still unlearning my perfectionistic tendencies by participating in Substack Go, a four-week “mini accelerator” for writers on the platform to learn and grow as writers. The identity of “writer” still feels like something that I’m newly wearing so it feels a bit weird and uneasy. I’m looking forward to this tactically jumpstarting writing but more psychologically helping me feel like I am not just someone who writes, but is a writer.

To that end, I’m eager to experiment with getting out of my head and learning in community with others. So join me next week as I host my first ever Twitter Space on February 7 at 6 pm PT/9 pm ET. We can have a hopeful conversation by answering this question: What one fact, experience, or concept that gives you hope when you think about the future of belonging?