Brian Explains: Perfection

I fear criticism for some reason and I don't know why. I grew up in a house free from biting analysis of my every word. Many times, the fear was not knowing if what I was working on was what I should have been working on in the first place. In my creative moments at home, working on an animation or drawing, writing a story, or creating a piece of music, I usually end a project before I consider it finished. If I take the time to show someone the progress on one of my creations, I usually preface it with great explanations of why it is not perfect.

I don’t like mistakes. I don’t like knowing I messed up, feeling like a failure, or being proven to be imperfect. Out it comes. I am a perfectionist. There are many of us around. Most of us remain in hiding until a mistake is made. Then, we leap from our stations in life and spring into perfectionist prevention mode. We want to know why the mistake was made, how we can prevent it in the future, and who knows that we made the mistake. Survival dictates that others must not know of the mistake. Preventive measures go into affect, but sometimes someone else finds out about the mistake before you do or your preventive measures don’t get implemented soon enough to prevent the word from getting out that you . . . I can hardly say it . . . made a mistake! Once the word gets out, you go through the stages of post imperfection. The first stage is denial. You look for anything that indicates it was actually someone else’s fault and not yours. Next comes the self-hating stage. You can’t believe you made the mistake. You must be an idiot to have made such a huge error. You shouldn’t be allowed to do what you messed up on ever again. It is the end for you and that faulty activity. Finally, you accept your failure (this could take weeks for a persistent perfectionist). You can try to prevent it in the future, but you there is no denying that it happened. Killing yourself would only be the biggest mistake of your life and the blundering trend is becoming redundant. It takes approximately 2-3 weeks for your perfectionist status to be reinstated. In the end, all that can be done is to focus on the future when you can consider yourself a perfectionist once again.

If you are not a perfectionist, consider yourself lucky. Every perfectionist realizes that perfection does not actually exist. We who are perfection hunters are not shooting for (or at) perfection, we just want to get as close to perfection as we can. You can hear a song that you think is perfect from beginning to end. I assure you that the artist who created the song can point out every mistake and flaw that exists in the song. Some artists would say that it is the flaws that make the song special. I would rather have an interestingly flawed life than a boringly perfect life. I feel like I could have said more about perfection than I have in this article, but sometimes you just have to consider something done before it is actually perfect. I think this last sentence is pretty darn representative of my thoughts on perfection.