![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
There was a vendor at one of my local conventions selling a set of materials from a collection they've called the Recovering Perfectionist. The messages on those items are both there to make you laugh, but also, if you're a recovering perfectionist, to make you smile and remind you that you don't have to let the weasels bite you quite so hard.
Each of those messages has been a difficult thing to learn, because Twice Exceptionality means a lot of success in the structured environments of schools, learning, and grading, and that can give you the feeling that while some aspects of your life might be loose, the wheels have not come completely off in everything, and so long as you keep succeeding at your coursework, everything will turn out fine.
I know the perfectionistic tendency was instilled early on in me, though. Because, to put it bluntly, children can be little shits to each other, even when you have teachers and other grown-ups trying to model better behavior for them and correct worse behavior. The way that capitalism currently constructs schools as warehouses for children while their grown-ups do the labor of capitalism, with any learning happening there as incidental (past the bare minimum needed to be a good cog,) creates situations where people who do well at academics often find themselves at odds with the people who are trying to do well in social aspects or athletic ones. Whether it's anti-intellectualism creating a tall poppy situation, or crab-bucketing from peers, and eventually mixed with pressure to fit in with your cohort, since you're going to be seeing them a lot, the pathway for people who do exceptionally well in schooling is often a lonely one. This phenomenon manifested, for me, as getting made fun of when making a mistake or otherwise having a moment of being human. It also didn't help that I expressed and felt emotions strongly as a child, and the negative ones very strongly (still do,) and therefore there were further opportunities to make fun if me for insufficient toughness or stoicism in relation to setbacks.
Child logic is often simple, elegant, and wrong. But that child concluded the way to avoid getting teased was not to make mistakes. Perfection became the goal, and the end point off the effort. When the inevitable imperfections happened and were not handled by the peer group with grace, but instead gloating and other antagonizing, it only reinforced the logic that perfection was the only acceptable outcome, and everything else from that was abject, intolerable, failure. That child withdrew into themselves, didn't like trying new things, and did not like situations where they could not perfect something, preferably in secret, before having to do anything in front of others. There was a lot of lost opportunity there, not that the child could have understood or articulated it there, nor really actually noticed when they were in the company of people who weren't going to pounce on their every mistake and parade it before everyone. I wasn't really equipped to try coming out of that shell until university days, when I finally was willing to believe that there was enough maturity around that failure wouldn't be treated harshly. (Which meant a certain amount of playing catch-up on how to handle social relationships in person, even if by now, I had figured out a lot of online interactions.)
There's a related and secondary strain here. I don't have strong memories of it, so treat me as an unreliable narrator here, but one of the people who I would eventually hang out with over shared interests mentioned that the one time we had actually come to blows (before our shared interests) was that, looking at a nasty problem, I had declared it easy (which it was for me) and that it had come across as arrogance and condescension, and he had been fed up with it, and that's why it came to blows. I had not been discouraged from belong obviously smart by the grownups in my life, only from my peers. I didn't believe that I was acting in arrogance or condescension, but that child also doesn't have the years of understanding and explanation as part of their job that the adult does. One of the things I have grokked in the intervening years is that if you demonstrate ease and familiarity with something that is difficult for someone else, they will tend to believe the problem is their own deficiency. And if you also make it sound simple and that they are stupid for not getting it, they will think poorly of you as well. This is something I had to learn through experience, a piece of tacit knowledge that everyone is expected to understand and behave accordingly. It's why I now try to explicitly highlight the difficulty, fiddliness, or other aspects of a task that make it easy for me and my experience and difficult for someone who doesn't see this same issue twenty times a day. It is rarely a question of intelligence and frequently a question of familiarity.
So it's entirely possible I came across as a better-than-thou prick because I had never been taught the socially acceptable ways to be smart, and how to hedge and couch and take into account the feelings of others in how I talked and responded. Because everyone was assuming I had already, or would, pick it up just from having bad social interactions. (Other members of the neurodivergent community may be nodding along here.)
So, still-undiagnosed me goes off into the world of working with people, and having bosses, and trying to adjust to a working environment that praises conformity, expects perfection as the standard of operation, and harshly punishes deviance from either of those places. And also gets into a relationship with someone who was bad for me, because she expects something different than what is being offered to her and chooses to make that my problem.
The manager that would have fired me, but for her retirement, certainly helped foster the idea that I was bad at my job in the important aspects of it, none of which had to do with my highly successful program with the game console players (too loud and boisterous, too teenager for the space), or my reasonably well-attended story times, or the relationships that I was forging with those teenagers by being at least a nominally cool adult in their lives who wasn't a parent or a teacher. No, what mattered to her was that I kept dropping the ball on telling her what I was doing, even if I had correctly reserved space for it, that I was rude and disrespectful to our Friends group by standing and listening, rather than sitting, even though sitting would have meant falling asleep, and that if I couldn't remember all of the procedures perfectly and all the appropriate exceptions, then I could not possibly hack it as a librarian. (And possibly that I showed up to my first day of work in jeans, which was unacceptably casual.) When I was in the disciplinary hearing that put me one step away from being fired, the question to me was "How will you fix these problems?" because these were things that probably seemed so basic and unremarkable that failing at them must mean the deficiency was me. I developed perfectionism as a compensation for bad experiences, so I was also on the train that I could and should be prefect at all aspects of everything. Nobody really stopped to consider the possibility that support was the thing needed, rather than condemnation, nor to notice that while I might have problems occurring here and there, I rarely repeated the exact mistake twice. (Same family of mistakes, sure. Mistakes related to how my brain likes to convince me that because I thought a thing, I actually did the thing, and the undiagnosed apnea issues and the very real problems of hitting an exhaustion wall when not having something to fidget or keep a part of my brain whirring on something else so I can focus, yes. Naturally, those were the mistakes that got the most scrutiny and condemnation.)
The difficult with answering those questions is that I was being asked how to ensure that my compensating systems ran at 101% uptime and efficacy, rather than what I needed in support so that I could use those systems effectively. I was the problem, I was broken, I needed fixing. When you're being asked how to push yourself to perfection when you know that your systems will glitch, and sometimes your brain will be completely convinced a thing got done even though it was only thought about, the only answer I had for them was "You'll have to trust me," because there was no other answer I could think of on how to make things run more perfectly for me when I wasn't even aware of the imperfections. Everything else that I was doing was just fine, but none of that provided any evidence in my favor that these were weaknesses that needed scaffolding and support, rather than perfection and greater grit and more extensive systems of control. With time and experience, I can see that demanding greater executive functioning from someone whose brain does really bad at executive function on its own (and sometimes even with the assistance and boost of medication) is a losing proposition and will only serve to frustrate everybody involved. At the time, though, my boss expected me to be perfect, I expected me to be perfect, and I managed something less than that, so it was complete failure.
So when you hear me say "Don't trust me, I'll only disappoint you," that's me telling you that I know my brain is glitchy and my compensation systems sometimes fail, and therefore I cannot operate at peak efficiency all the time. Because of that, give the mission critical, time-bound operations to somebody else whose brain does not require all these supports, or commit to the scaffolding, reminders, nags, and other structure I need to make sure things keep moving at proper pace and deliverables arrive on time. It also sometimes means that if you don't want to have a relationship or a friendship with someone who has all of these issues, then it's fine to not. Because I treat the idea of someone I like being upset with me as a failure of me, another indication of my imperfection, and therefore my complete failure at being a good human. I tend to believe that the worst expressions of myself are the truest ones, and are the ones that people should expect as my baseline authentic self that I've built plenty of artifice on top of. Expect the structures to crumble. Expect the perfect self to be imperfect. Understand the worst version of me is who I am when I'm not trying to fool you into thinking I'm better than that. Even if I say I'm not like that, not like those dangerous brutes, don't trust me. I'll do something that prices the warnings right, I'm sure.
Yes, it's ridiculous, but that's what perfectionism, rejection sensitivity, trauma, and VAST did to me. I know I'm not supposed to see self-worth as something earned or conditional upon others, but I've spent a large chunk of my life so far in situations where being the person I am has not been met with welcoming situations, or with offers of accommodation to mitigate the worst aspects. It's better now, now that I have more information and understanding of how my brain works and commonly glitches, and there are people in my life who are willing to work with that, and even profess to like me, despite my imperfections. (Sounds fake, but okay.) It's also better now, because many of the things that I'm choosing to engage with or practice are for me and not anyone else. So they can stop at Good Enough. Or if they are for others, like cooking or helping with cooking, the standard is not "Would Prue and Paul approve of every aspect of it?" but instead "Was it delicious? Did nobody get sick from it? If yes on both counts, success."
The bad boss retired. I eventually ended the bad relationship, having to finally admit to myself that I could not perfect it, and I could not be perfect for her, A new relationship saw someone like them and then proceeded to nag me until I got diagnostics and prodded me to explain to the person diagnosing what I am like when none of my compensating systems are online, rather than what I'm like when in operating at my best days. Because admitting I am imperfect is still hard, even when there are benefits to doing so.
There was a vendor at one of my local conventions selling a set of materials from a collection they've called the Recovering Perfectionist. The messages on those items are both there to make you laugh, but also, if you're a recovering perfectionist, to make you smile and remind you that you don't have to let the weasels bite you quite so hard.
- Failure is Absolutely an Option
- Practice Makes Good Enough
- Dream Mediocre
Each of those messages has been a difficult thing to learn, because Twice Exceptionality means a lot of success in the structured environments of schools, learning, and grading, and that can give you the feeling that while some aspects of your life might be loose, the wheels have not come completely off in everything, and so long as you keep succeeding at your coursework, everything will turn out fine.
I know the perfectionistic tendency was instilled early on in me, though. Because, to put it bluntly, children can be little shits to each other, even when you have teachers and other grown-ups trying to model better behavior for them and correct worse behavior. The way that capitalism currently constructs schools as warehouses for children while their grown-ups do the labor of capitalism, with any learning happening there as incidental (past the bare minimum needed to be a good cog,) creates situations where people who do well at academics often find themselves at odds with the people who are trying to do well in social aspects or athletic ones. Whether it's anti-intellectualism creating a tall poppy situation, or crab-bucketing from peers, and eventually mixed with pressure to fit in with your cohort, since you're going to be seeing them a lot, the pathway for people who do exceptionally well in schooling is often a lonely one. This phenomenon manifested, for me, as getting made fun of when making a mistake or otherwise having a moment of being human. It also didn't help that I expressed and felt emotions strongly as a child, and the negative ones very strongly (still do,) and therefore there were further opportunities to make fun if me for insufficient toughness or stoicism in relation to setbacks.
Child logic is often simple, elegant, and wrong. But that child concluded the way to avoid getting teased was not to make mistakes. Perfection became the goal, and the end point off the effort. When the inevitable imperfections happened and were not handled by the peer group with grace, but instead gloating and other antagonizing, it only reinforced the logic that perfection was the only acceptable outcome, and everything else from that was abject, intolerable, failure. That child withdrew into themselves, didn't like trying new things, and did not like situations where they could not perfect something, preferably in secret, before having to do anything in front of others. There was a lot of lost opportunity there, not that the child could have understood or articulated it there, nor really actually noticed when they were in the company of people who weren't going to pounce on their every mistake and parade it before everyone. I wasn't really equipped to try coming out of that shell until university days, when I finally was willing to believe that there was enough maturity around that failure wouldn't be treated harshly. (Which meant a certain amount of playing catch-up on how to handle social relationships in person, even if by now, I had figured out a lot of online interactions.)
There's a related and secondary strain here. I don't have strong memories of it, so treat me as an unreliable narrator here, but one of the people who I would eventually hang out with over shared interests mentioned that the one time we had actually come to blows (before our shared interests) was that, looking at a nasty problem, I had declared it easy (which it was for me) and that it had come across as arrogance and condescension, and he had been fed up with it, and that's why it came to blows. I had not been discouraged from belong obviously smart by the grownups in my life, only from my peers. I didn't believe that I was acting in arrogance or condescension, but that child also doesn't have the years of understanding and explanation as part of their job that the adult does. One of the things I have grokked in the intervening years is that if you demonstrate ease and familiarity with something that is difficult for someone else, they will tend to believe the problem is their own deficiency. And if you also make it sound simple and that they are stupid for not getting it, they will think poorly of you as well. This is something I had to learn through experience, a piece of tacit knowledge that everyone is expected to understand and behave accordingly. It's why I now try to explicitly highlight the difficulty, fiddliness, or other aspects of a task that make it easy for me and my experience and difficult for someone who doesn't see this same issue twenty times a day. It is rarely a question of intelligence and frequently a question of familiarity.
So it's entirely possible I came across as a better-than-thou prick because I had never been taught the socially acceptable ways to be smart, and how to hedge and couch and take into account the feelings of others in how I talked and responded. Because everyone was assuming I had already, or would, pick it up just from having bad social interactions. (Other members of the neurodivergent community may be nodding along here.)
So, still-undiagnosed me goes off into the world of working with people, and having bosses, and trying to adjust to a working environment that praises conformity, expects perfection as the standard of operation, and harshly punishes deviance from either of those places. And also gets into a relationship with someone who was bad for me, because she expects something different than what is being offered to her and chooses to make that my problem.
The manager that would have fired me, but for her retirement, certainly helped foster the idea that I was bad at my job in the important aspects of it, none of which had to do with my highly successful program with the game console players (too loud and boisterous, too teenager for the space), or my reasonably well-attended story times, or the relationships that I was forging with those teenagers by being at least a nominally cool adult in their lives who wasn't a parent or a teacher. No, what mattered to her was that I kept dropping the ball on telling her what I was doing, even if I had correctly reserved space for it, that I was rude and disrespectful to our Friends group by standing and listening, rather than sitting, even though sitting would have meant falling asleep, and that if I couldn't remember all of the procedures perfectly and all the appropriate exceptions, then I could not possibly hack it as a librarian. (And possibly that I showed up to my first day of work in jeans, which was unacceptably casual.) When I was in the disciplinary hearing that put me one step away from being fired, the question to me was "How will you fix these problems?" because these were things that probably seemed so basic and unremarkable that failing at them must mean the deficiency was me. I developed perfectionism as a compensation for bad experiences, so I was also on the train that I could and should be prefect at all aspects of everything. Nobody really stopped to consider the possibility that support was the thing needed, rather than condemnation, nor to notice that while I might have problems occurring here and there, I rarely repeated the exact mistake twice. (Same family of mistakes, sure. Mistakes related to how my brain likes to convince me that because I thought a thing, I actually did the thing, and the undiagnosed apnea issues and the very real problems of hitting an exhaustion wall when not having something to fidget or keep a part of my brain whirring on something else so I can focus, yes. Naturally, those were the mistakes that got the most scrutiny and condemnation.)
The difficult with answering those questions is that I was being asked how to ensure that my compensating systems ran at 101% uptime and efficacy, rather than what I needed in support so that I could use those systems effectively. I was the problem, I was broken, I needed fixing. When you're being asked how to push yourself to perfection when you know that your systems will glitch, and sometimes your brain will be completely convinced a thing got done even though it was only thought about, the only answer I had for them was "You'll have to trust me," because there was no other answer I could think of on how to make things run more perfectly for me when I wasn't even aware of the imperfections. Everything else that I was doing was just fine, but none of that provided any evidence in my favor that these were weaknesses that needed scaffolding and support, rather than perfection and greater grit and more extensive systems of control. With time and experience, I can see that demanding greater executive functioning from someone whose brain does really bad at executive function on its own (and sometimes even with the assistance and boost of medication) is a losing proposition and will only serve to frustrate everybody involved. At the time, though, my boss expected me to be perfect, I expected me to be perfect, and I managed something less than that, so it was complete failure.
So when you hear me say "Don't trust me, I'll only disappoint you," that's me telling you that I know my brain is glitchy and my compensation systems sometimes fail, and therefore I cannot operate at peak efficiency all the time. Because of that, give the mission critical, time-bound operations to somebody else whose brain does not require all these supports, or commit to the scaffolding, reminders, nags, and other structure I need to make sure things keep moving at proper pace and deliverables arrive on time. It also sometimes means that if you don't want to have a relationship or a friendship with someone who has all of these issues, then it's fine to not. Because I treat the idea of someone I like being upset with me as a failure of me, another indication of my imperfection, and therefore my complete failure at being a good human. I tend to believe that the worst expressions of myself are the truest ones, and are the ones that people should expect as my baseline authentic self that I've built plenty of artifice on top of. Expect the structures to crumble. Expect the perfect self to be imperfect. Understand the worst version of me is who I am when I'm not trying to fool you into thinking I'm better than that. Even if I say I'm not like that, not like those dangerous brutes, don't trust me. I'll do something that prices the warnings right, I'm sure.
Yes, it's ridiculous, but that's what perfectionism, rejection sensitivity, trauma, and VAST did to me. I know I'm not supposed to see self-worth as something earned or conditional upon others, but I've spent a large chunk of my life so far in situations where being the person I am has not been met with welcoming situations, or with offers of accommodation to mitigate the worst aspects. It's better now, now that I have more information and understanding of how my brain works and commonly glitches, and there are people in my life who are willing to work with that, and even profess to like me, despite my imperfections. (Sounds fake, but okay.) It's also better now, because many of the things that I'm choosing to engage with or practice are for me and not anyone else. So they can stop at Good Enough. Or if they are for others, like cooking or helping with cooking, the standard is not "Would Prue and Paul approve of every aspect of it?" but instead "Was it delicious? Did nobody get sick from it? If yes on both counts, success."
The bad boss retired. I eventually ended the bad relationship, having to finally admit to myself that I could not perfect it, and I could not be perfect for her, A new relationship saw someone like them and then proceeded to nag me until I got diagnostics and prodded me to explain to the person diagnosing what I am like when none of my compensating systems are online, rather than what I'm like when in operating at my best days. Because admitting I am imperfect is still hard, even when there are benefits to doing so.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-13 08:00 am (UTC)...am I sure I didn't write this?
Because, outside of Bad Boss (...or not? Different flavour of Bad, I think)
...yeah. Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-13 08:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-13 08:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-13 08:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-13 08:12 pm (UTC)And Paul Hollywood has earned every bit of spite any contestant shows him.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-13 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-13 08:11 pm (UTC)