Perfection Ruins

  We fought and loved and battled in waves, and finally, the unrelenting struggle grew tired and began to flag, to flag for truce and truth. You said things I wanted to hear, and things that I didn't. I lashed and howled and tried to fight the both of us at once, and urged the both of us on to terrible acts, committed. I rent myself and You so deeply, the tears began to seep out of the floor...and now, now we both have a hand in destroying the home. We both have fault in destroying ourselves.

  Time slips away from me.

  I got into the car, and a man, a pastor Rick Something was speaking about how perfection ruins our lives. I'll be damned if he wasn't speaking to me. He said that a perfectionist doesn't always come in the form of someone who is "perfect," but too often it is the most imperfect person, one who uses perfection as a standard for themselves, measuring constantly their imperfectness against either their imagined ideal self, or against what their imagined form of perfection is. This gives the poor perfectionist a perpetual armory of pikes and powders and projectiles with which to pummel and punish themselves for not reaching perfection. In this way, the perfectionist is a slave, always believing that it is the measure and account of performance that pleases their Master. Every day the slave must wake and worry about the sheer number of  tasks perfectly performed, deeds needed to obtain and retain favour of the Master. Thus, the slave can never be certain of his station, and the list of failures and insufficiencies—sometimes real, sometimes unsubstantiated— and the feelings of dysmorphia replenish the armory of perfect pain.

  Of course, the perfectionist—believing that there is such a thing as "the" perfect—also holds others to this imagined standard. In doing so, they are allowing themselves to pronounce judgments and values as though they were foundational to the situation, as though they were righteous; but, that doesn't mean right. The perfectionist becomes disappointed —unwilling to become dis-illusioned—when the object of their perfection proves to be ineffective in fulfilling the fantasy, and then the pitiful begins to criticize and pick apart the imperfect performance of the partner, casting the same blame and guilt upon the other as they do upon themselves. The perfectionist drives both themselves and others into frustration, annoyance, anger, and it is and perpetual cycle as long as Perfect is a goal, a desire, an idea.

  In this way, a perfectionist can end up driving away the very one they respect the most. In this way, the perfectionist can distance themselves from the masses. In this way, the perfectionist can lose the very means of improvement. In this way, the perfectionist ruins lives.