I wouldn’t necessarily say I am a perfectionist. I don’t need to make sure the lines are straight or anything like that. What I do, though, is to expect perfection from the things I do: my grades, cleanliness (to a degree), those types of things. It’s not necessarily about things needing to be perfect, it’s a standard of behavior that I hold myself to.
The easiest way to see this is grades, A is the only thing that I strive for, and anything else is worse. I don’t have this attitude with anyone else, but me. So I never expect this of others or what not. So to a degree, I realize how strange it sounds.
It’s almost as if I expect perfect every time, the first time. This is something I really identified with Felicia Day’s biography, which I basically loved and bought the audiobook and the hard cover and had it shipped to Germany.
I realize how irrational it sounds, where is the learning? the growth? etc.
And to a degree I can understand those, because it’s rational. We need to grow, to change, and to learn. Mistakes are how we learn things. So I do understand.
But it’s taken me a really long time to get to this point, and I still have to say, my first reaction is disappointment. I don’t look at a bad grade or a mistake as a learning experience firstly. I look at it as a personal failure. I had a teacher who said that the grades were learning experiences. And they were. And it was something I had to deal with when I was younger, but I kind of thought I was over that now, matured and wiser now.
But I’ll never be perfect, the first time, or any time. Perfection is a dream, it’s irrational and unrealistic. Yet even as I say this, I know the next bad grade or mistake, I will feel as if it reflects some deep mistake and personal failing.
So all I can say is that to redefine my expectations of myself and my mistakes is a constant every day battle. It requires me to evaluate myself and separate certain actions and mistakes from my character and worth as a human being. You can make mistakes and not be a flawed human being. Human beings make mistakes.
But the mantra I need to repeat is: My mistake does not make me a flawed person.
There is a mistake and there is me and I am not my mistakes, I am the person who learns from her mistakes and does not make them again.