When most people think of perfectionists, they think of people who are trying to impress others or gain praise or approval. But there is another kind of perfectionist – often quieter, and almost certainly more relentless – whose perfection has nothing to do with others.
Their only audience is the person looking back at them in the mirror.
Few of us understand this distinction, which is why we believe that telling ourselves that our work is “good enough,” or that we need to lower our standards should work. But if you are an internally driven perfectionist, you know that it rarely does.
The reason is that your perfection reflects a striving toward beauty and excellence, toward life and what is genuinely possible. Some psychologists call it the “flourishing gene” – a deep orientation to live life fully and to give it all you’ve got. The gene exists in all of us but is activated in only a few. You’ll know it is if you tend to feel life intensely, to be moved by a sunset, or a piece of music. If you feel elevated by the sight of human altruism or called toward making a difference in some small way. Or if you are nostalgic for times that were somehow kinder, more beautiful, more in alignment with something you can sense but not quite name.
I’ve always been that kind of person – the one who chokes with emotion at almost anything, even the sound of a firetruck! People like us tend to be sensitive, thoughtful, conscientious. Our kindness can be mistaken for pleasing, and our drive for excellence considered the tyranny of perfection, even though it’s neither. We live on a different dimension altogether: the z-axis of possibility. It is also called the axis of the soul, of the part of us that envisions a better future and is committed to making it happen.
Living on this axis is not easy because we are, after all, human. We are fallible and imperfect. We can act out of greed and jealousy. We can become afraid and impulsive in a world that is also imperfect. Which is why the two endpoints of the z-axis are divinity and disgust. When we act in ways that are misaligned with our ideals, we feel disgusted with ourselves. And disgust compels us to run away from our badness and toward the pure. The godlike. The perfect.
To live on the z-axis, and to experience the possibilities in our hearts, we must make space for being human. For only when we learn to cross, over and over, the porous and non-existent divide between good and bad, and right and wrong, do we access the truth of who we are: more than our fears and failings. We are the people who show up for what is important even when we are carrying fear or grief in our hearts, still making dinner, still making plans, still laughing and loving fiercely with a whole-hearted yes! to life. We are our soul’s longings.
Carl Rogers, who spent a lifetime studying what it means to self-actualize, believed that our basic nature, when functioning freely, is trustworthy and constructive. Not because we have earned it. Not because we have finally got it right. Not because we have reached some externally determined ideal of optimization. But because goodness is simply who we are.
This is the truth that meets the age-old ache of being human for a soul that wants to fly. Not that you will be good once the mess is finally sorted. That you are good now. Good as you are, before the fixing, before the repentance. Good even when you’re having a bad day, a tired morning, or a mind that simply can’t focus. Good even when your reply comes out sharper than you intended, or your actions hurt the person you love dearly.
So take a moment to reflect on whether you’re holding space for your humanness. For me, this has been a lifelong lesson. For almost as long as I remember, the only way I could deal with the emotional unease of mess and imperfection was to erase the past from my mind and start all over again. This time better. This time perfect.
Even as a six-year-old, I would erase my letters over and over until they sat on the line like little pearls. When I was ten, I would beg friends to restart our pretend plays every time someone went off-script. As I got older, starting over became a regular feature of my inner life. As though the next moment, the next day, the next year would somehow transform me and my life into the promised perfect version.
In hindsight, it was never really about the letters. Or the script. Or what I said or did. Or how I said or did it. It was the repentance of a self that believed herself to be bad in some undefined and overarching way. When I turned forty, I realized that the never-ending fresh starts meant I was still waiting for my life to begin. Still waiting for the day I will have sorted this messy life, fixed this imperfect self, and ushered in a new era of perfection.
I now try to live as the GPS of a car. A GPS never puts you down for missing a turn. It doesn’t tell you to go back to the beginning and start over. It simply, calmly and without judgment, tells you to reroute back to where you were headed. Except my GPS does so with a lot of compassion because not being unkind is not the same as being deeply loving. And only compassion can unlock the power and possibilities within us.
This is the work we do on this Substack. Every season, we work through one of the deeper truths, what it is, how to find the one that lives beneath your particular fear, and how to nurture it until it becomes the ground you stand on. If you aren’t subscribed already, I’d love for you to be. Because this work is worth doing. Not only for our own joy and flourishing, but for a world that needs our actualization, not our optimization.