While in search for an antidote to perfectionism, I stumbled on the notion of an elegantly disheveled life.
I often professed to be a healthy perfectionist, which is a bit of an oxymoron. Anything taken to the absolute is heading into toxic territory. Perfectionism is no different. At best it is conscientiousness with a critical voice. There is nothing wrong with striving for excellence, but everything is wrong when failures trigger pernicious self-judgment, which is something I struggle with. I set unrealistic standards for myself (for example, never ever being tardy, being a 100x-return employee), and resent myself for missing the mark, and that internal torment has taken me to the point of unraveling. I subject those around me to the same standard, arising from my ego and arrogance, and impart judgment when they predictably and understandable go unmet.
There are many components to the antidote for perfectionism. The first: find humor in everything. Life is sometimes too absurd to take seriously. We are really just lumps of protein animated by electrical signals and chemical reactions, lost in this little delusion we call consciousness. In the grand scheme of things, juxtaposed against the incomprehensible scale of the universe, we’re nothing, and our suffering is nothing. So why not laugh a little?
The second, find beauty in everything. Beauty in rough things. In loneliness, desolation, silence, and melancholy. In the old T that you brought tucked in overstuffed luggage after your college days. In the chewed up tip of a pen marked for every stray thought, in the snowman with tilted nose destined to die in the sun, in the manicured bed-hair of the nonchalantly beautiful, in the charms of mismatched socks, in the allure of the unmade bed and pyjama pants, in tried but unrealized plans, in heartrending and unrequitedly love, in failure.
Suddenly I’m thinking of the Roosevelt Arena speech:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Here’s to the tried and fallen, the strived and downtrodden.
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