How Perfectionism Makes Us Ill

We become perfectionists from a primary sense of being unworthy; uninteresting, flawed, a disappointment, a let-down, a nuisance. So powerful is this sense, so appalling is its pressure on our psyches, we are prepared to do more or less anything to expunge it.

Working all hours, currying favour with authority, doing twice as much as the next person – these are the tools with which we seek to cleanse our apparently undeserving selves. One part of the mind promises the other that the completion of the next challenge will finally usher in peace.

We aren’t interested in perfect work at all: we are trying to escape from a feeling of being awful people, and work simply happens to be the medium through which we strive to grow tolerable in our own eyes. But because our problem didn’t begin with work, work can never prove the solution.

Our real goal is not, as we think, to be an ideal employee or professional, it is to feel acceptable. But responsibility for a sense of acceptance cannot be handed over to our bosses or customers or a ceaselessly demanding capitalist system; these will never let us rest easy.

We need to allow ourselves to imagine that we deserved to be accepted from the start and that it cannot forever be our fault in our minds that we were not. It is not up to us to try to prove that we have a right to exist. It is asking too much of ourselves to have to experience a referendum on our legitimacy every time we hand in a report, every exam we have to pass, every customer we have to serve.

Working well is an admirable goal, but it becomes a symptom of mental perturbation when it becomes the cover for a secret aspiration to correct a deficit of early love