Last week, my wife had her 60th birthday.
So, naturally, I’ve been thinking about dying.
In the past few years, life has changed. My wife and I have buried three of our four parents, making me thoroughly cognizant of my own mortality and the fact that I will, someday, end. As a result, I’ve been reevaluating … everything … from relationships with friends and family to the mental gymnastics that, while I’ve been doing them my entire life, are merely bad habits left over from an insecure childhood.
Enter should.
I do a lot of things because I should, and it’s really starting to piss me off.
No … no one is telling me what I should do. It’s all me: me and five-plus decades of psychological conditioning. Growing up, yearning for love and approval in a perfectionist-run household, I became adept at figuring out what others wanted from me and set out to do that for them, no matter how difficult the goal. My psyche, forged in the fires of perfectionism and expectation, still retains the smith’s hammer-marks.
The lawn’s a bit shaggy; I should mow it. We have that pot luck on Saturday; I should figure out something spectacular and unusual to bring. I haven’t heard from so-n-so for a while; I should call him. This book won a Pulitzer; I should read it. It won a freaking Pulitzer; I should like it. I haven’t won a Pulitzer; I should write another book, a better book, a prize-winning book.
Should Should Should
Should is a fogbank that separates me from me. It cloaks the desires of others in the guise of my own, obscures my dreams, and makes my achievements invisible. Perfectionism drives me toward unattainable goals, because as soon as I stick that landing and put those 10s up on the board, the rulers shift, the dials go to 11, the expectations rise, and I’m once more playing second fiddle to my own ideals.
Add should to perfectionism and you get a death-spiral of recrimination and failure and despair.
This week, I began an experiment. Whenever my internal dialogue says I should do something, I ask myself if I want it to do it. Thus, I should mow the lawn becomes Do I want to mow the lawn? It’s surprising how often the answer to these questions is “No.”
Yes, I still do some things I don’t want to do, but only when I want the end result. For instance, I don’t want to go to work, but I do want the paycheck. But the lawn? It can wait another week. That phone call? He never calls me, so maybe I just won’t bother.
Replacing should with want frees me to dump the ridiculous goals of my upbringing and concentrate instead on my own. I want to be a good husband. I want to be a good man. I want to write another book. I want to have a long and healthy retirement. I want to die fulfilled, happy, and at peace with those around me … oh, and old. Very old. Very very old.
That’s what I want, and therefore that’s what I should.
k
[…] readers know that I battle with perfectionism. It chides me for what I’m not doing, and berates me for what I have done. Perfectionism is both a goad […]
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[…] touched on this before, pondering strategies to deal with the tyranny of should, but while this line of thought is a logical outgrowth of that previous one, my earlier post dealt […]
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I can relate to this in many ways, but my guilt and perfectionism are not put on me by me parents. I feel that it comes from deep inside, nagging me when I sit and watch television rather than doing something “real” or “important.” I have a hard time “just relaxing.” I believe my love for heavy metal music is related to these feelings in the sense that the music and the experience of being in a mosh pit at a concert are moments when I can’t hear myself think (and judge). It’s those noisy metal moments when I let go and do something I WANT to do with no guilt. Thanks for the thoughtful post.
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I don’t blame my parents for my issues on this. Though my mother was a raging perfectionist, I doubt her legacy would have plagued me all this time if her perfectionism hadn’t found fertile ground within me and, after about the age of 25, when I knew I had issues on this score, it’s on me, not her. There has to be a personal predisposition for perfectionism and a strong need to be seen and loved that keeps it going into adulthood. Otherwise, we’d just tell them all to eff off.
As with you, I have difficulty just chillin’. It’s why I enjoy gardening: I can put my brain in park, while knowing there’s a purpose and an outcome. Oddly, though, this revelation came while out on a solo drive in Pepper. As there’s no real purpose to it (except getting home again) I began to wonder why it was I enjoyed it so much. I mean, she’s fun to drive and all, but I’m not going anywhere; I have no fixed plan when I’m out driving. And yet, I enjoy myself, and feel relaxed afterward. I realized that hey, I like to drive Pepper, and that is reason enough. I just need to give myself permission to relax and enjoy my life. Sad that it’s taken me fifty-odd years to figure that out, but better now than when I’m 90, eh?
–k
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I should add that we are ambitious people with a few handicaps physically, but we have worked very hard and are just starting to enjoy a slower pace.
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I don’t think ambition and perfectionism are tied. You can have one without the other, no? However, having also worked hard for many decades, I’m starting to prepare myself for a slower pace. Part of that is learning how to enjoy doing that at which I do not excel. Like, I want to learn how to paint without worrying about if I’m any good or not. I want to learn to speak Italian without fearing I’ve mis-conjugated a verb. I want to write a book for the love of writing a book, and without being paralyzed by the fear that it isn’t the Best Book Ever. I want to be free to do something, even if it’s not my best, because it’s fun. I don’t expect perfection from anyone else…why do I expect it from me?
Thanks for the comments!
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Somehow I don’t feel the compulsion you do. I just asked my husband and he is of the same mindset. We are 52 and 60 respectively. There are a few things we’d like to do but generally there is some level of contentment. Are you dissatisfied? Is their guilt? Do you have a system of beliefs? I have a lot of questions!
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Oh, I envy those who, like you, don’t feel compelled to be perfect. I think, perhaps, most people don’t feel the pressure of perfection, and that’s definitely a good thing. Having only myself as a test group, I feel it comes from the mindset in which I was raised. Every activity had to have a purpose — something learned, something fixed, something produced, something won. Reading “for fun” wasn’t reading; it was wasted time. Reading for edification, _that_ was acceptable. You can probably imagine how my mother reacted to my non-literary novels. “When are you going to write a _real_ book?”
But for every person out there struggling against their perfectionism, there is a unique set of conditions that led to it. Not having made a study of it, I can only speak from my point of view.
To answer your questions, yes, there is dissatisfaction and there is guilt, both of which are useless and irrelevant to _me_ and what I want.
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Ahhh. Oddly I was raised by northern hillbillies (I write this with affection!) but then at 18 I married a traditional Japanese man who was a creepy perfectionist and a abuser. I tried to do everything for a very long time just as he ordered. I divorced him after 14 years together (he’s in prison by the way . . .) and. In my freedom I cannot stand any demands. When you know what it’s like to be free from demands and then jump head first into a perfectionist’s world you begin to detest demands. I’m a born again hillbilly.
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As someone said, “The grass may be greener on the other side of the fence, but it takes a lot of manure to keep it that way.”
😉
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I love this post! I can relate to each and every single sentence of it, except for the 6 decades. I’ve only been practicing perfectionism myself for 4 decades. But that’s long enough, if you ask me. The trouble with such a long-build habit of following others’ shoulds is that at some point we tend to forget our wants. Me, that is. It took me a lot of soul-searching to rediscover my authentic passions because they were hidden under a huge pile of shoulds and oughts. I’m so glad I’m finally reconnecting. It’s an unusual but liberating feeling. Good luck with your wants!
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Thanks so much! Another problem I have with the perfectionism is that it can freeze me up. One reason I’ve had such difficulty starting my next book is, if it isn’t going to be perfect, if it isn’t going to win a Pulitzer (ha!), then why bother? Perfectionism is the death of dreams, the death of desire. It’s one thing to strive for perfection, as long as you’re pleased with something less than the mark, but if not, it’s just a withering death of the heart.
Regards — k
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I couldn’t agree more. Perfectionism is very often hailed as excellence. But it’s so not about that. It’s about fear mostly, trying to control things that are out of our control. Withering death captures really well what it does to us on the inside…
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Just read your post on Kitsugi, and had a similar thought.
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Thanks a lot for stopping by 🙂 I never knew how many perfectionists are out there, until I started blogging. So many similar patterns. It’s mind-boggling.
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