Fuck Perfect
A tale of bath towels and balance
Greetings, my gentle fucklings!
Ya girl has had a long and chaotic week (including a whirlwind trip to my 25th college reunion, which was A LOT), the brain fog is peaking, and I have a very exciting dinner reservation in less than two hours. Ergo, today I shall be ripping off my own personal perfectionist Band-aid to give YOU a few quick tips for keeping perfectionism at bay, and I’m not going to proofread it before I hit send—oh, the horror!1
But first, I need to tell you about The Towel Conversation…
The Towel Conversation
“I have a question for you,” I said to my husband.
“Yes, dear?”
“It’s a serious question. Like, this isn’t a joke, and I’m also not criticizing you—I really want to know the answer.”
He folded his hands in his lap, regarding me with the practiced gaze of a man who has been in a relationship with a perfectionist for more than two decades.
“I’m curious”—I hesitated, sincerely not wanting to come off as critical, but desperate for answers—“if…when you hang up the bath towel…do you look at it and think That’s straight, or do you notice that you left it crooked and you just don’t care? Or do you…could you possibly…”
“What do you think?” he responded, one eyebrow raised, cool as an Old Spice model.
“You don’t even notice, do you?”
“Got it in one.”
The Towel Conversation, which took place many years ago, is illustrative of three things: my mild OCD; the way my husband and I sometimes see the world differently; and how we each choose to interact with it.
For example, I was a straight-A student because B-pluses gave me stomach aches; he happily brought home B-minuses because that was the minimum he had to hit in order to keep his parents off his back.
I am very careful and precise in both word and deed; he’s more of a shoot-first-ask-questions-later bull in a china shop.
I beat myself up over the smallest failures; he rolls with the punches.
Guess which one of us is, on the whole, a happier person?
GO ON I’LL WAIT.
Now, to be fair, I’ve had a lot of success in my life—and much of it was probably due to all of that hard work, focus, and discipline. (Plus, a decent amount of privilege and some actual perfection, like that one time I made a damn fine soufflé on my first try.)
But I’ve also experienced a lot of self-inflicted disappointment as a result of the same.
In other words: I’ve overachieved, but I’ve also underperformed. And if I hadn’t always put so much pressure on myself to succeed at the highest level, it wouldn’t have been quite so crushing to come up short.2
But you don’t have to be a natural-born perfectionist like moi to feel pressured to “do your best” on a daily basis, do you?
It’s a chorus we’ve all heard during every tee-ball game we’ve ever played, before every test we’ve ever taken, at every job we’ve ever had, and in advance of every elimination challenge we’ve ever seen on Top Chef.
The people yelling or advising or even just gently suggesting it weren’t necessarily trying to fuck with our heads in perpetuity (they may not even have equated our “best” with “actual perfection”), but the pressure, she builds nonetheless.
Do your best. Be the best. Don’t mess up.
That shit’ll catch up with you if you let it.
So today, and to that end, here are a few strategies I baked into my book You Do You, and to which I frequently return when the going gets too perfect for my own fucking good.
4 Tips for Keeping Perfectionism at Bay
Tip #1) Lower the bar
One of my favorite anti-overthinking-and-overdoing-it tips is inspired by celebrity chef and all-around goddess Ina Garten, who says that when planning a dinner party, she writes out the whole menu in advance and then cuts one or two dishes before she even goes grocery shopping.
Voilà: Life just got easier! And I don’t know about you, but I feel like we could all learn a thing or two about quality of life from a woman who goes by “The Barefoot Contessa.”
Tip #2) Be the first to fuck shit up
The day my father got a brand-new 1987 Nissan Maxima, he took us all out to get ice cream. We ate it in the car so that if anything was going to happen to that sweet, sweet brown suede interior, it was going to happen right away and then my dad could stop torturing himself with imagined horrors. Know thyself.
Tip #3) Look around you
Now, more than ever, the world is full of dumbasses. I’m sorry, but it’s true. So the next time you’re worried about taking a couple of vacation days or calling in sick so you can make it to visitors’ weekend at your kid’s camp, or just to do a round of “bed rotting” because we all need a duvet day sometimes—take a gander at your collegial cohort.
Really, I urge you to consider how these people operate.
And if your company hasn’t gone under yet with the knuckleheads in Advertising/HR/Billing/etc., then it’s probably okay for you to take a three-day weekend, Champ.
Tip #4) Talk to literally any old person
Old people have been THROUGH IT. They know shit happens and that, in the end, there’s no point in trying to be perfect all the time. They’re just happy to be here, which you could be to, if you stopped beating yourself up about the little things.
(Maybe even some of the big ones? Follow your heart!)
Okay folks, that’ll do it for today. For more on battling your perfectionist tendencies, check out the post below, a cautionary tale if ever there was…
Until next time,
Sarah
More on overcoming perfectionism, featuring Back to the Future and a boss who made me cry:
She says, having spent four hours yesterday drafting three different posts, torn out a small quantity of hair, and deemed all of them “not good enough.” Trying to take my own advice out here, kiddos!
The sleepless night I once endured after misspelling “Hemingway” on a high school paper, thereby receiving a grade of 97 instead of 100, was a low point.
OMG the bath towels! I’ve been seething for years about how he never hangs it up straight, and yet I KNOW he drops things wherever and shoves things in drawers. This is a ME thing, I need to let go of this or do it for me (my own mild OCD), but without the anger.
Thank you for your service to humans, Sarah. I get so much relief from reading your reminders (as I think of them) about life and other people.💕
I have thought about this post way too much over the past week. At first, I thought about the premise of the post... about losing some of the toxic perfectionistic ways that I also relate to. I even forwarded it to one of my besties who also stresses out about this shit. But then I got mad. And thought - how did I get suckered into accidently reading and relating about why it's a common thread in women to find flaws with themselves over shit like this. Mad because it sounds like you are someone who is intentional with your space, which is not a flaw. Also, (I think) you are in a cis/het relationship, which means this was always going to be your job and your spouse would wonder why this bothers you so much and you wonder why it doesn't bother him and at the end of the day the "flaw" lands on you. Which is fucked up.
Bath towels (or whatever) consistently hung without regard in a place where it would make a difference is irritating.
Being a girl who gets berated and passed up for something because of a 97 vs 100 is a fucking reality.
Boys who not only can get by with less than that but can fucking excel with less than that is also a reality.
And yeah, guess who is the happiest person? The person who consistently had to do less to get more who doesn't have to be fucking vigilant about things because they have never had to be vigilant about things. That tracks.
Maybe you are not a perfectionist, maybe the other people in your life are goddamn lazy and they can be because there's always "someone" to pick up the invisible slack.
If you don't give a fuck about the bathtowels - great. But if your truth is that it makes your eyeballs itch less to have them straight, then the people who disagree/lazy/etc who are saying they don't care... well then they are really saying that they don't give a fuck about your peace. If they don't give a fuck about the bathtowels, then it won't be a hardship to tighten that ship up right?