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silveradept[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#24: "Perfection Is The Only Way To Avoid Trouble."
We've seen some of the effects of this particular thought all throughout this series. It's still one that's difficult to get out of my head, because it's been such a core part of me from very early on in life, and it kept getting reinforced at many points in my life, so I don't think this is one that I'm going to be able to get rid of fully. I think it's become sufficiently part of my coping mechanisms that unwinding it would involve having to construct entirely new ways of relating to the world and having them stick. That's not impossible, but it's going to take a lot of effort to achieve.
Part of it is because a child who realizes they sometimes have issues with time or distractedness or otherwise not remembering the things they are supposed to do is a child that is going to try and order their life in such a way so that they don't have the opportunity for those weaknesses to strike. Which generally meant that work was to be done almost as soon as it was assigned. In elementary school, that was much easier to do, since there was enough time to work on things during class, and some of those things were things that I either knew well enough to do or could read ahead with while the explanations were going on. Because schoolwork is best done at school, right? That didn't work as well for me when I was taking a class that I understood a little of at the beginning, but then started finding out that I didn't have the prerequisite class and its understanding, and because I didn't understand it, I was doing what I had done before, which was trying to do a project to keep my time occupied and that wouldn't be a distraction to others. (That also didn't work. I got a talking to from the teacher about needing to pay attention more in the class, but he also understood that the issue was likely that I didn't have the prerequisite class. To be fair to myself, I was taking this class four or five years before it would have appeared in the normal sequence of things, and before I was done with that academic year, I would pick up an American literature class that was at a similar level of difficulty and do perfectly fine in that.) What I know now about fidget needs and also about how long sessions of concentration are possible for things that are interesting (even if I don't fully understand them), but are not always as equally possible for things that I can't sink my head into, because variable attention stimulus trait, makes that entire sequence make so much more sense. Having a fidget probably would have helped in that situation, but having the prerequisite course would have helped more.
Which made me a kind of a nerd, and also a weirdo, and therefore, to some degree, a target. My elementary school was parochial, and apart from the tests that pointed out that there was nothing wrong with my intellect (if only they could have known to also test my attention, as well), I don't remember there being all that many issues with others (I'm pretty sure there were Big Feelings). Although there are stories that the family tells about my confidence as a small child about things, some of which I might have been right or wrong about, but being a small child, were all mostly seen as the kinds of things that small children do, and that sometimes make their relatives proud of them, even if the thing itself wasn't anywhere near correct. Where the first set of problems I remember happening was in the third grade, when "the public school kids" arrived. Mind you, one of those kids was a good friend of mine, and we used to go over to each other's houses regularly and play violent video games together. (We lost contact for a while, and then I got a call from him once in my university days, and we lost contact again. Given that he'd joined the military, I wonder if his name is in an obituary somewhere.) But there were other kids, and they were very ready to make fun of the weird kid with odd speech patterns, with math skills and reading skills and other such things. Especially when the smart kid made a mistake, or couldn't best the teacher, or wasn't as physically whatever as the others were. I remember it being an issue to the point where some of the people from the class I was taking out of sequence wrote a note to them to tell them to knock it off. (The more I remember of that, the more I understand why someone might have thought I had an arrogant attitude, but what I really wanted, of course, was the teasing to stop.) And being the smart kid at the year-end awards for all the years I was there made me feel pretty one-note as I went onward.
That didn't change much into the rest of my required schooling, other than that I sort of added the "nerd who games" facet to myself, since my other nerdy friends were the nerds who understood software and electronics, and I was not as interested in learning to program as much as to use things. But I could type fine, and I still knew plenty when it came to the "learning how to use Windows / learning how to use this newfangled thing called the Internet" part, since I had both of those at home and could demonstrate to the teachers that I knew what I was doing. There were some stumbles and some struggles, but they were generally with the more advanced classes I was taking, and even when I completely forgot a thing that was due the next day, I was able to engineer something with polystyrene and gelatin to make a cell model. No, it wasn't my finest work. But in those situations where my brain had failed to remember the thing, I was still doing fine, and I was still trying to make sure that I got my work done first before turning to some other pursuits, and I often tried to make my weekends as clear as possible so I could use them for dedicated time for games and other projects, so that if I sank into something and didn't come up until I was told to go play outside, there wasn't anything that I was forgetting to do.
University imposed both more and less structure on me, and so I was still trying to get my work done as soon as I could, so that when it was time to have fun with other people, or to do the other things that would take up at least some chunk of my weekend, I could be reasonably sure that I wasn't missing anything. Graduate school gave me longer lectures and assignments, but it also gave me bigger stretched of time between those lectures and discussions, so I had more opportunities to both get my work done and to get my hyperfocus on to play games, or spend time with others, or go attend sporting events that I hadn't before, because my schedule allowed me to pop down to the field hockey field, for example, and watch games that way. And it was at graduate school where I finally loosened a little bit of my academic requirements for perfection (or something close to it) because it was the end of the line for me. Since I wasn't trying to maintain sufficiently good grades and scores to get to the next level of academia, I was more content to accept Bs as being fine rather than potential derailments.
Unfortunately, as I was giving myself less grief with regard to academics, I was giving myself more grief with regard to social things, and already starting to put in the systems that were trying to make sure I could get places on time. And the first few discoveries that after exertion and ending up in a warm room, I was not always staying awake in my lectures. Even though I was trying to concentrate on them and pay attention to them. It's where I first learned that if I sat in the back, and when I was trying to fall asleep when sitting, if I stood up, I could manage to convince whatever system was trying to get me to fall asleep to reboot itself and help me stay awake. At least while I was standing up. I'd get out the door, or halfway to somewhere, and forget that I intended to bring something, or I'd have to leave myself reminders, or just put the blasted thing in the car if it could stay there the entire time between now and when I would forget the thing and then discover that I had been smarter than myself when it turned up in the car when I needed it. I set alarms, I left myself reminders. (Smartphones have been helpful for this, they really have.) When the system was working, I could keep my appointments, remember to bring the right things to them, and make it to my lectures on time. When the system didn't work, because I thought I would put something in later (which I wouldn't), or because I hadn't given myself a long enough reminder to get things going, there was a rush and, usually, an apology. And the other part of the system came into being, which was essentially allowing Waiting Mode to dictate when and what I would be doing at any given time. Because I was pretty sure that a lot of those things that I wanted to do were going to be interesting, and I needed to be able to stop doing them at the right time so I could go and do the other thing that was also going to be interesting. Another good reason for trying to keep my weekends and days where I didn't have any class clear so that I could hyperfocus on those days, and then try to schedule myself in such a way that I was basically tightly scheduled on days so that I was layering the appointments on and doing work before lecture or otherwise giving myself things that I was going to do so that I could keep my self moving and my time along with it.
Where the snarl happened, of course, is once I was out of the structured university environment and into the Real Working World and the real Relationships World, because now it wasn't wholly me who was ordering my time and who was evaluating whether they thought I was good at anything. Both in my bad relationship and my first manager, there was an expectation that I would be able to manage my time neurotypically, and to order my thoughts in the same way, and to behave in neurotypical ways. One of the things that my terrible ex did well was provide a certain amount of structure. She did it in the worst kinds of ways, because she would demand a fairly rigid schedule of me and when I was supposed to text her and call her and what chores had to be done at what times and at what times I needed to attend to her (as she hyperfocused instead). And since she would get upset and start accusing me of not caring about her or loving her if I deviated from the schedule, or if I didn't do the thing she told me to immediately when she told it to me (including the "go feed the dogs" while in the middle of doing a game that some friends remember vividly as a reason they didn't like her), it was very effective at getting me to order my time around hers. My manager, I think, was expecting some of the same things about time, but also was expecting a certain amount of me adjusting to her way of doing things, or to have already absorbed (or to quickly absorb) the tacit knowledge of what working with her would entail. Since she was also good at ensuring that mistakes were punished, that meant I had two people in my life who I was trying to stay on the good side of and failing regularly.
For as much as I could design and try to implement systems to compensate for my nauroatypicality, the system is only as good as my ability to stick to it, and because nobody is actually perfect, no matter how hard I tried, there would be situations and gaps and mistakes, each of which would bring unhappiness and punishment and the understanding that it was my fault that these consequences were leveled. So more systems, more effort, more will, more reinforcement of the idea that perfection was the only way to avoid trouble that had been steadily drummed into me from the earliest days of people making fun of me. And more self-flagellation when it turned out that I was not in fact, perfect. Accepting all the fault and the blame made it easier for me to control how other people reacted to the situation and gave me the best opportunity to blunt those reactions into something less. It didn't always work, since, after all, I nearly did get fired, and my ex was a person who didn't always react with forgiveness or sympathy when I was trying to be the child of Omelas.
It took changing the situation before I could even start to undo the damage. One changed on me, with the retirement of that manager, and the eventual installation of other managers, who I could work with better by incorporating them into my systems, along with other co-workers. Having a better idea of what worked for me, and getting some of the assistance I needed in the form of the sleep apnea treatments helped, because now I at least had enough knowledge and energy to ask a new manager and my other co-workers if they would send me e-mail about things that we had discussed if there was something that I needed to take action on. Or if they could send me meeting appointments in advance so I could put them in the calendar and therefore would be able to look at them and prepare for them in time. And to turn my efforts toward trying to figure out what the specific triggers were for the situations I was trying to avoid. (Caffeine and sugar are both pretty good at getting me to want to have an afternoon nap if I have too much of them and then I don't do too much moving after the meal or the caffeine.) It also helps that the people that I share a house with understand my neurodivergence and don't see it as a character fault, and have found some systems of their own about how to interact with me when they want me to do something, or remember something, how to impart the priorities of things to me, or when they want to establish boundaries around how much time I spend on chores versus on things that will be enjoyable. It's been really good for helping me get some exposure therapy to things not being perfect, and everything not exploding in a shower of blame and anger when things aren't perfect. And even when there have been explosions of blame and anger, we now know what the reasons why were for them, and with the diagnosis, I understand better what was happening and how I might be able to approach that situation in the future so that there isn't nearly as much anguish caused by the time issues and the difficulties of gathering enough inertia to get going on time.
There's still work going on with the systems, in refinement, in getting other people to help me help them by using those systems, and in dismantling some of the systems that I put in place in a misguided attempt to protect myself. I still find it a minor miracle in my own head when things aren't perfect and someone else simply rolls with it, or forgives me for things that aren't perfect. Or even doesn't expect perfection out of me. I wouldn't expect perfection out of anyone else, and I'm pretty flexible about rolling with things and finding solutions to situations, including the ones that make everyone else happy and that I can work through. But in myself, it's still a primary brainweasel, a product of hypervigilance and a belief that the only way to avoid getting hurt for making mistakes was not to make them in the first place. There's enough evidence in place that says that I can be imperfect in my life, and things will be okay. It's not an easy thing to believe, because of my history, but the more that it happens where I can make mistakes and they are treated as mistakes instead of as invitations to hurt, the more I can believe that mistakes are forgivable and can be worked through.
#24: "Perfection Is The Only Way To Avoid Trouble."
We've seen some of the effects of this particular thought all throughout this series. It's still one that's difficult to get out of my head, because it's been such a core part of me from very early on in life, and it kept getting reinforced at many points in my life, so I don't think this is one that I'm going to be able to get rid of fully. I think it's become sufficiently part of my coping mechanisms that unwinding it would involve having to construct entirely new ways of relating to the world and having them stick. That's not impossible, but it's going to take a lot of effort to achieve.
Part of it is because a child who realizes they sometimes have issues with time or distractedness or otherwise not remembering the things they are supposed to do is a child that is going to try and order their life in such a way so that they don't have the opportunity for those weaknesses to strike. Which generally meant that work was to be done almost as soon as it was assigned. In elementary school, that was much easier to do, since there was enough time to work on things during class, and some of those things were things that I either knew well enough to do or could read ahead with while the explanations were going on. Because schoolwork is best done at school, right? That didn't work as well for me when I was taking a class that I understood a little of at the beginning, but then started finding out that I didn't have the prerequisite class and its understanding, and because I didn't understand it, I was doing what I had done before, which was trying to do a project to keep my time occupied and that wouldn't be a distraction to others. (That also didn't work. I got a talking to from the teacher about needing to pay attention more in the class, but he also understood that the issue was likely that I didn't have the prerequisite class. To be fair to myself, I was taking this class four or five years before it would have appeared in the normal sequence of things, and before I was done with that academic year, I would pick up an American literature class that was at a similar level of difficulty and do perfectly fine in that.) What I know now about fidget needs and also about how long sessions of concentration are possible for things that are interesting (even if I don't fully understand them), but are not always as equally possible for things that I can't sink my head into, because variable attention stimulus trait, makes that entire sequence make so much more sense. Having a fidget probably would have helped in that situation, but having the prerequisite course would have helped more.
Which made me a kind of a nerd, and also a weirdo, and therefore, to some degree, a target. My elementary school was parochial, and apart from the tests that pointed out that there was nothing wrong with my intellect (if only they could have known to also test my attention, as well), I don't remember there being all that many issues with others (I'm pretty sure there were Big Feelings). Although there are stories that the family tells about my confidence as a small child about things, some of which I might have been right or wrong about, but being a small child, were all mostly seen as the kinds of things that small children do, and that sometimes make their relatives proud of them, even if the thing itself wasn't anywhere near correct. Where the first set of problems I remember happening was in the third grade, when "the public school kids" arrived. Mind you, one of those kids was a good friend of mine, and we used to go over to each other's houses regularly and play violent video games together. (We lost contact for a while, and then I got a call from him once in my university days, and we lost contact again. Given that he'd joined the military, I wonder if his name is in an obituary somewhere.) But there were other kids, and they were very ready to make fun of the weird kid with odd speech patterns, with math skills and reading skills and other such things. Especially when the smart kid made a mistake, or couldn't best the teacher, or wasn't as physically whatever as the others were. I remember it being an issue to the point where some of the people from the class I was taking out of sequence wrote a note to them to tell them to knock it off. (The more I remember of that, the more I understand why someone might have thought I had an arrogant attitude, but what I really wanted, of course, was the teasing to stop.) And being the smart kid at the year-end awards for all the years I was there made me feel pretty one-note as I went onward.
That didn't change much into the rest of my required schooling, other than that I sort of added the "nerd who games" facet to myself, since my other nerdy friends were the nerds who understood software and electronics, and I was not as interested in learning to program as much as to use things. But I could type fine, and I still knew plenty when it came to the "learning how to use Windows / learning how to use this newfangled thing called the Internet" part, since I had both of those at home and could demonstrate to the teachers that I knew what I was doing. There were some stumbles and some struggles, but they were generally with the more advanced classes I was taking, and even when I completely forgot a thing that was due the next day, I was able to engineer something with polystyrene and gelatin to make a cell model. No, it wasn't my finest work. But in those situations where my brain had failed to remember the thing, I was still doing fine, and I was still trying to make sure that I got my work done first before turning to some other pursuits, and I often tried to make my weekends as clear as possible so I could use them for dedicated time for games and other projects, so that if I sank into something and didn't come up until I was told to go play outside, there wasn't anything that I was forgetting to do.
University imposed both more and less structure on me, and so I was still trying to get my work done as soon as I could, so that when it was time to have fun with other people, or to do the other things that would take up at least some chunk of my weekend, I could be reasonably sure that I wasn't missing anything. Graduate school gave me longer lectures and assignments, but it also gave me bigger stretched of time between those lectures and discussions, so I had more opportunities to both get my work done and to get my hyperfocus on to play games, or spend time with others, or go attend sporting events that I hadn't before, because my schedule allowed me to pop down to the field hockey field, for example, and watch games that way. And it was at graduate school where I finally loosened a little bit of my academic requirements for perfection (or something close to it) because it was the end of the line for me. Since I wasn't trying to maintain sufficiently good grades and scores to get to the next level of academia, I was more content to accept Bs as being fine rather than potential derailments.
Unfortunately, as I was giving myself less grief with regard to academics, I was giving myself more grief with regard to social things, and already starting to put in the systems that were trying to make sure I could get places on time. And the first few discoveries that after exertion and ending up in a warm room, I was not always staying awake in my lectures. Even though I was trying to concentrate on them and pay attention to them. It's where I first learned that if I sat in the back, and when I was trying to fall asleep when sitting, if I stood up, I could manage to convince whatever system was trying to get me to fall asleep to reboot itself and help me stay awake. At least while I was standing up. I'd get out the door, or halfway to somewhere, and forget that I intended to bring something, or I'd have to leave myself reminders, or just put the blasted thing in the car if it could stay there the entire time between now and when I would forget the thing and then discover that I had been smarter than myself when it turned up in the car when I needed it. I set alarms, I left myself reminders. (Smartphones have been helpful for this, they really have.) When the system was working, I could keep my appointments, remember to bring the right things to them, and make it to my lectures on time. When the system didn't work, because I thought I would put something in later (which I wouldn't), or because I hadn't given myself a long enough reminder to get things going, there was a rush and, usually, an apology. And the other part of the system came into being, which was essentially allowing Waiting Mode to dictate when and what I would be doing at any given time. Because I was pretty sure that a lot of those things that I wanted to do were going to be interesting, and I needed to be able to stop doing them at the right time so I could go and do the other thing that was also going to be interesting. Another good reason for trying to keep my weekends and days where I didn't have any class clear so that I could hyperfocus on those days, and then try to schedule myself in such a way that I was basically tightly scheduled on days so that I was layering the appointments on and doing work before lecture or otherwise giving myself things that I was going to do so that I could keep my self moving and my time along with it.
Where the snarl happened, of course, is once I was out of the structured university environment and into the Real Working World and the real Relationships World, because now it wasn't wholly me who was ordering my time and who was evaluating whether they thought I was good at anything. Both in my bad relationship and my first manager, there was an expectation that I would be able to manage my time neurotypically, and to order my thoughts in the same way, and to behave in neurotypical ways. One of the things that my terrible ex did well was provide a certain amount of structure. She did it in the worst kinds of ways, because she would demand a fairly rigid schedule of me and when I was supposed to text her and call her and what chores had to be done at what times and at what times I needed to attend to her (as she hyperfocused instead). And since she would get upset and start accusing me of not caring about her or loving her if I deviated from the schedule, or if I didn't do the thing she told me to immediately when she told it to me (including the "go feed the dogs" while in the middle of doing a game that some friends remember vividly as a reason they didn't like her), it was very effective at getting me to order my time around hers. My manager, I think, was expecting some of the same things about time, but also was expecting a certain amount of me adjusting to her way of doing things, or to have already absorbed (or to quickly absorb) the tacit knowledge of what working with her would entail. Since she was also good at ensuring that mistakes were punished, that meant I had two people in my life who I was trying to stay on the good side of and failing regularly.
For as much as I could design and try to implement systems to compensate for my nauroatypicality, the system is only as good as my ability to stick to it, and because nobody is actually perfect, no matter how hard I tried, there would be situations and gaps and mistakes, each of which would bring unhappiness and punishment and the understanding that it was my fault that these consequences were leveled. So more systems, more effort, more will, more reinforcement of the idea that perfection was the only way to avoid trouble that had been steadily drummed into me from the earliest days of people making fun of me. And more self-flagellation when it turned out that I was not in fact, perfect. Accepting all the fault and the blame made it easier for me to control how other people reacted to the situation and gave me the best opportunity to blunt those reactions into something less. It didn't always work, since, after all, I nearly did get fired, and my ex was a person who didn't always react with forgiveness or sympathy when I was trying to be the child of Omelas.
It took changing the situation before I could even start to undo the damage. One changed on me, with the retirement of that manager, and the eventual installation of other managers, who I could work with better by incorporating them into my systems, along with other co-workers. Having a better idea of what worked for me, and getting some of the assistance I needed in the form of the sleep apnea treatments helped, because now I at least had enough knowledge and energy to ask a new manager and my other co-workers if they would send me e-mail about things that we had discussed if there was something that I needed to take action on. Or if they could send me meeting appointments in advance so I could put them in the calendar and therefore would be able to look at them and prepare for them in time. And to turn my efforts toward trying to figure out what the specific triggers were for the situations I was trying to avoid. (Caffeine and sugar are both pretty good at getting me to want to have an afternoon nap if I have too much of them and then I don't do too much moving after the meal or the caffeine.) It also helps that the people that I share a house with understand my neurodivergence and don't see it as a character fault, and have found some systems of their own about how to interact with me when they want me to do something, or remember something, how to impart the priorities of things to me, or when they want to establish boundaries around how much time I spend on chores versus on things that will be enjoyable. It's been really good for helping me get some exposure therapy to things not being perfect, and everything not exploding in a shower of blame and anger when things aren't perfect. And even when there have been explosions of blame and anger, we now know what the reasons why were for them, and with the diagnosis, I understand better what was happening and how I might be able to approach that situation in the future so that there isn't nearly as much anguish caused by the time issues and the difficulties of gathering enough inertia to get going on time.
There's still work going on with the systems, in refinement, in getting other people to help me help them by using those systems, and in dismantling some of the systems that I put in place in a misguided attempt to protect myself. I still find it a minor miracle in my own head when things aren't perfect and someone else simply rolls with it, or forgives me for things that aren't perfect. Or even doesn't expect perfection out of me. I wouldn't expect perfection out of anyone else, and I'm pretty flexible about rolling with things and finding solutions to situations, including the ones that make everyone else happy and that I can work through. But in myself, it's still a primary brainweasel, a product of hypervigilance and a belief that the only way to avoid getting hurt for making mistakes was not to make them in the first place. There's enough evidence in place that says that I can be imperfect in my life, and things will be okay. It's not an easy thing to believe, because of my history, but the more that it happens where I can make mistakes and they are treated as mistakes instead of as invitations to hurt, the more I can believe that mistakes are forgivable and can be worked through.
