Majority of people don’t strive for perfection. They give up early in the game and either accept their flaws or they just don’t care how they are perceived, or worse, they don’t admit or realize. Then there are the few that everyone looks at and says nothing but great things while a few whisper behind their back in jealousy. Those few people hold everything in very well. They learned a long time ago that their weaknesses were easily exploited and they had to work at making them go away. Or perhaps they never felt good enough and are constantly trying to fill in the gaps to make it up to everyone they think should care about them.
It starts simple at first. You have this will to achieve something; acceptance, freedom, respect…. It doesn’t start out as people thinking you are perfect, or at the minimum hold you to this pedestal so high that you can’t see through the clouds any more. You keep building these pieces around you. Trying to make them strong and sturdy, maybe because you crave structure because that somehow was lost in a time of need. Everyone around you starts to see something different. Of course you ignore it because you have felt like a failure all your life and you keep thinking that you are that same person you have always been. When people start to lean all their weight against your walls it is unrecognizable at first. You don’t realize it until a brick starts to crack, maybe it wasn’t built as well as you thought.
Everyone pecks about your perfected walls and they ask to build it higher and you do because you are proving something, no longer to them, to yourself. You are proving that you’re no longer that weak person who once had no control or understanding, you realize in a short period of time that you’ve become statuesque and everyone is staring at you thinking how great you are, how different, how much they wish they could be like you, and then the critics talk about all the reasons why it is the way it is when they may not know anything at all. So more people lean upon you hoping to rub off on you and wanting to live up to your standard.
The only problem is that you have no standard. You haven’t found it yet because you’ve been searching for it, searching for that person you want to be but you don’t know who it is because you have been too busy trying to fill in those gaps that you lost sight of what you were building.
Being a perfectionist is a sickness. It is never accomplished because we are human and we make mistakes. However a perfectionist understands that. A perfectionist hates that. So instead of ignoring their mistakes they dwell and they nitpick and they tear themselves apart forgetting anything good that was once done by their hands. They lower their expectations sometimes for others so their wall will get stronger.
The secret to being a perfectionist is to take the world on your shoulders and rip yourself in to pieces so that each day you can get stronger and stronger to hold the world up on your pedestal instead of the other way around. The secret is to resent all your bad decisions for eternity and not let anyone else tell you different. Because a perfectionist knows the only way to make themselves feel better is to keep building and to build it better, stronger.
The problem with being a perfectionist is you never become yourself, you become what everyone wants and needs you to be. Few can do it, and many try, but no one ever succeeds.
Writer Daze 