Have had a couple people recently tell me that perfectionist tendencies are being destructive to myself and that I need to get out of my own way. So that’s real neat and nice.
Perfectionism is such a weird thing to accept. I’ve got that crippling kind of perfectionism were I just don’t do anything, because I’ve decided in my head that I’m not actually as smart as people think. It feels weird to call that perfectionism, but very worth looking deeper into.
oyster ya know, that was actually a part of the conversation last night. It's not even a laziness thing so much as a "crippling over-analysis of every possible outcome and scenario" thing...which does have it's benefits it certain situations, but I think is more a "using a hammer to solve every problem" mechanism right now.
Ya for me it’s a fear of not being able to live up to expectations, because every expectation anybody has had of me didn’t take into account that I was dyslexic. It always looks like laziness for some reason, I think that’s why perfectionism has to be pointed out by other people. Like I have a great picture in my head of what I want to do, but completely lack the tools to get there. The perfectionism comes in when I am given the tools to do something, meet or exceed the expectation and then still feel like I must be falling short. I started a new job recently and every single time I’ve been asked how I felt about my own performance at work I’ve been told to not be so hard on my self and it’s like...oh? You want me to relax? Meanwhile in my head I thought I picked this super small thing to fix and was super nice to myself. I’ve been looking for books lately on this, if I find a good one I’ll make sure to recommend it.
Yeah, I'm in the process of listening. The problem I'm running into is, I don't really know what a person is supposed to do about that.
I think I get an impression of what something would ideally look like and react strongly to not meeting that ideal or feeling unprepared to achieve that, and am just generally not dealing well with criticism as of late. You are right about the "potential" because another part of this has been the fact that these reactions are unpredictable to the people giving me this feedback.
Well mk, people on this coast are enormous babies. If someone is standing on your foot, etiquette here would require you to say, "excuse me, sorry to bother you, but you are standing on my foot." If you were to say,"Hey! Get off my fucking foot!" You would have to listen to at least an hour of explanation on how no one meant to stand on your foot and that it really hurt their feelings to be asked not to stand in feet in that manner with such strong language. Next thing you know I find I'm trying to figure out if I'm supposed to apologise for having got my foot stepped on. I'll give you an precise example. The other day, someone close to me was ruining some of my things. Of course I said, "Stop doing that to my things, you'll ruin them!" She stopped but gave me a hurt look and sulked away. A few days later my wife said, "You know, when she was destroying your things, she didn't realize it and you needn't have said it like that." Names and things obscured to protect the innocent but the real problem was I didn't apologize at the start of objecting to my shit getting destroyed. Now being that you are a good midwestern, who's also lived on the East coast you wouldn't think about apologizing to someone who is standing on your tits, but that's exactly how it's supposed to be done out here. Sometimes I'm an asshole but other times I am, without malice, very direct and it's taken awful hard. If there is an upside to all this it's that people are very aware of the violence of language and attitude and I've learned a great deal about all the subtle ways we go at each other that I might not have learned if I lived in another place. I'm still learning it today. Another upside is that if you need to get something done or you have found yourself in the middle of something or in a bit of a tight spot, people here are easy to bully. You can bully and bluster your way out of most things if needs be. Oregon my Oregon!