Hundred Hand

I am a perfectionist. That doesn’t just mean that I want everything to be perfect, everybody wants that. It means that I have a hard time accepting imperfections. By definition, I am a normal adaptive perfectionist; meaning I am able to take joy from my actions when they meet my standards, and that, for the most part, I am able to fit in with society. Basically, this the most mild flavor of perfectionism.

There are some good aspects to this: I’ve never cheated on anyone, I work very hard at the things I feel I can do well, I produce high quality work, I stay in good shape, keep a fairly healthy diet and am good with personal finances.

But I’m also a huge procrastinator. This I have learned, goes hand in hand with perfectionism. When you feel that you won’t be able to do something well enough, you don’t want to start doing it in the first place. Take writing this blog post for instance. I have a lot of things to say, but I’m writing it up very slowly, and rereading often as I go. And the whole reason I am writing a blog post, is to avoid an issue at work to which I’m assigned, and am having difficulty figuring out. I don’t like to do things on a whim because I need to have my schedule planned out perfectly in advance. I avoid sports which I don’t think I’ll be good at (even hackysack for a while), and I go extremely long times between relationships waiting for the stars to align. If I don’t like any of the food I have in the house, I won’t eat. My desk at work is spotless, not because I am a neat person, but because cleaning is another one of my procrastination techniques. Compare that to my room at home, which is quite messy because I haven’t had to do any serious work there in a long time.

But I’ve found a cure for all of these; it’s this great new thing called alcohol. I discovered in college, while trying to write term papers that I am able to write much more easily with just a beer or two in my system. It’s not necessarily great writing, but it’s not terrible and it’s much better than writing nothing. Plus I can always go back when I’m sober and fix it up. I also program better, am able to talk to strangers without fear of saying the wrong thing and am much less afraid to make a fool of myself by trying to sing or attempt a physical activity. Alcohol may be debilitating when trying to drive a car, but it’s quite enabling in most other ways for a person like myself.

This might be my own nearsightedness, but I assumed (at least before researching this) most people are perfectionists. After reading about some of the traits of perfectionism how many of you identify with these? In a totally flawed study, 18% of people were determined to be perfectionists; let’s see how that lines up with our even more flawed results.