The Perfectionists Who Can't Get Their Shit Together

Years ago, church service found me sorting through the nonsense piles of a hoarded home in my neighborhood. I pulled handful after handful of miscellany out of a kitchen drawer. Baggies, twist ties, flashlights, batteries, sticky notes, eating utensils, writing utensils, charging cords, hair elastics, hair clips, tiny rubber bands, all-but-empty tape rolls, fruit snacks, fly paper, pen caps, dice, single earrings... Many items were clumped together with a brownish mystery substance. All crammed so tight the drawer had to be pried open. As I sifted through layer after layer of the detritus of life, something surprising emerged below.

At the base of the drawer was a bamboo organizer, not overfilled with perfectly arranged office supplies. Pens, staples, post-its, stamps, pencils, tape, paper clips, etc. My jaw dropped. I’d been doing my Christ-like best not to judge this woman as a slob and now this. It felt like a bucket of ice water poured over my head.

She was me. I was her and she was me.

I’m about to reveal some of my inner-most crazy. So bear with me and see if you relate. Or just sit back with your popcorn and enjoy for entertainment value. Whichever.

I didn’t know I was a perfectionist until I was in my thirties. Don’t you have to have done at least SOMEthing perfect to claim that title? Because I never did. Turns out, no. You don’t. You can be an absolute fucking disaster and still be a perfectionist.

In fact, the disaster might actually be a direct result of the perfectionism.

I was a hot mess in school. But every semester I started over with the same plan.

This was going to be the semester. I was going to stay organized. Keep track of everything. I was going to write down all my assignments, and in an unprecedented second step, look at the place where I had written them down and get them done.

For a little while, I’d have an A.

Then I’d miss something. Or lose something. Or forget something existed until three days after it was due. A couple things would pile up. I wouldn’t know exactly what I was missing anymore.

Photo by Alexas_Fotos on Unsplash

And then I’d just stop. All the way. An A first quarter, then a B, then a C, then a D, then my teacher pulled me into the hallway. “If there’s anything you want to talk about… I’m here.”

Same with planners.

If you’ve seen my home on any random day, you might be confused why my husband spent so many years trying to talk me into lowering my housekeeping standards. From the outside, they definitely appear to be low enough.

They weren’t. And the household perfection I had in mind was only achievable through elaborate household systems. Each zone broken into granular jobs slotted into all throughout my calendar.

Daily. Weekly. Monthly. Quarterly.

Not just toilets and vacuuming. Moldings. Picture frames. Cabinet fronts. Inside, underneath, behind.

There was an assigned time for all of it.

Which worked great until the day I woke up and remembered I don’t like to be told what to do. Not even by myself. I don’t like consistency and I abhor monotony. So I skipped that day.

Now I was behind. But behind on what? Everything. So what should I do first?Everything.

Eventually the whole grand, unwieldy plan came crashing down. Not because anything was wrong with my plan, mind you. No.

My system was excellent. I, however, was apparently a piece of shit.

That one was just a schedule falling apart. But I had a version of this that started earlier. Back before the pens or the vacuuming. It was about becoming a person worth loving on the inside.

Mormonism.

I could just not Mormon right.

And this one really mattered. Deeply and eternally.

There was a right way to be. Things I was supposed to do. Things I was supposed to think and want and feel. Obedience wasn’t enough. Transformation was the goal. Fully becoming.

I knew very young that this was not going well. By fifteen, I had figured out that being perfect was completely impossible for me. And perfect was the point. Imperfect hurt people. Most especially the savior. Who loved me so much. So I gave up.

And I don’t mean I became a slightly less committed Mormon teenager who occasionally skipped Mutual and swore. I went off the deep end. Boys. Alcohol. Drugs. School didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. For a while I didn’t try very hard to keep living either.

There’s obviously a lot more to that story than perfectionism, and I’m not going to reduce some genuinely dark years of my life to a failed spiritual diet but I can see the pattern now.

I knew how to try to do it right. And I knew how to say fuck it. I was really, really bad at anything in between. Which is probably why it took me until my thirties to figure out I was a perfectionist. Because look at my life.

I wasn’t the person with the immaculate house and the 4.0 and the meal-prepped lunches lined up in matching glass containers. I was the person surrounded by abandoned attempts to become that person. And underneath nearly every one of them was a bamboo organizer. A perfectly reasonable-looking system for how this was all going to work.

What I know now is that all of those failures were bursting with information.

If I bought a planner every year, used eleven pages and then abandoned it, that was information.

Housekeeping systems repeatedly crashing. Diets requiring a lifestyle I couldn’t maintain. Information.

If I had spent years trying to become the kind of Mormon I was supposed to be and eventually concluded that the only alternative was to blow the whole thing up, that was definitely information.

But somehow none of the information was ever about the standard being wrong for me. A misfit

The standard was fine. Maybe. I don’t know. I never questioned the standard. Never. If you had letters after your name or a priesthood ordination, you had my trust. Wholesale.

I was the problem. The common denominator that kept failing the systems that seemed perfectly viable. That seemed perfect on paper. That were working so well for all THOSE people.

I just needed to be more disciplined. Consistent. Less lazy. Less impulsive. More organized. More committed. More righteous. Better at following through.

If I would just USE the planner. STICK to the diet. FOLLOW the schedule. My problems would all be solved. Maybe I’ll just try another new one and see if it will keep my attention.

And maybe it does for a minute. Until…

Until someone gets sick. You forget something. You don’t sleep. You get busy. You buy a candy bar at check out. You run out of the ribbon for that wreath. You miss the assignment. You don’t do the laundry. You have a bad day. You have a good day and decide you’d rather do something else with your time and energy.

For most of my life, if I missed a day (skipped the workout, ate Oreos, didn’t open the planner) I didn’t know how to just miss a day. I only knew how to spiral or quit. Missing Tuesday meant Wednesday started in debt.

It sounds obvious now, but it took me decades to learn: you can just do Wednesday. You don’t have to catch up on Tuesday first. You don’t have to restart, or figure out how to prevent yourself from ever slipping again. You can just do the next thing.

I still hate this. I’d rather build a system that never lets a Tuesday go wrong in the first place.

I LOVE systems.

I want the right system. The one that finally accounts for every variable and makes everything click into place and means I never again have to stand in my kitchen at 4:37 p.m. wondering what the hell everyone is going to eat.

But my brain now flies neon red flags at systems that require me to become a different person in order for them to work.

For example, I don’t do lids. This is stupid, but stay with me. If you want me to consistently put something away, I need to be able to do it one-handed. Preferably without moving anything else.

If its designated home has a lid, I will put it on top of the lid. If its designated home is behind something else, I will put it in front of the something else. If I have to pull out one container to get to another container, the item is becoming random clutter somewhere else.

None of these things are hard to do. Opening lids. Setting down whatever else is in my hands to move one thing, lift a lid, etc. And that used to matter. If it wasn’t hard, and it was organizationally sound, I should be able to do it. Just make it happen, Brittney.

I wasn’t asking if that system worked for me and the way I move around my space. I was telling myself the way I thought a human should behave in a space the way a space should run. See the difference there?

Not: Does this work?

Why can’t you do this?

That question has followed me everywhere.

Why can’t you just keep up with your assignments?

Why can’t you just use a planner?

Why can’t you just keep the house clean?

Why can’t you just stick to the diet?

Why can’t you just read your scriptures?

Why can’t you just do the very normal, reasonable thing that other people seem perfectly capable of doing?

I was always the defendant in the courtroom of my own brain.

Which is why I think that bamboo organizer hit me as hard as it did.

I had been pulling handfuls of crap out of this woman’s drawer and trying very hard to be a good person about it.

Don’t judge. You don’t know her circumstances. Everyone struggles. Very Christ-like. But obviously, underneath all that benevolence, I had an explanation for this mess.

She was a slob. She didn’t take care of things. She didn’t try. And then I hit bamboo. Oh. She had tried. At some point, she had bought the organizer.

She probably stood in the kitchen aisle at Target and looked at the different sizes. Maybe she’d even measured the drawer. Then she’d brought it home and put the pens in one compartment and the batteries in another and the tape where it still sat.

And for a while the drawer looked exactly like it was supposed to. And then life happened. One thing that didn’t have an obvious compartment, then another. Until eventually the system was buried so deep I didn’t know it existed.

And my first instinct, looking at the end result, had been to evaluate the woman. The way I’d always done it.

I had spent years standing over the accumulated evidence of my own life doing exactly the same thing.

Failed systems. Abandoned planners. Bad grades. Messy rooms. Abandoned projects. I could see perfectly well that whatever I was trying to do was not working.

I just never thought that gave me permission to question any of the standards I was holding myself to.

The standard remained untouched. I didn’t.

Every new failure went into the file:

Lazy.

Inconsistent.

Undisciplined.

Too much.

Not enough.

Can’t follow through.

There are things I do differently now. I use open bins. I put things where I’m actually going to use them. I have much less respect for where something is “supposed” to go. I am learning, very slowly and with considerable resistance, that missing Tuesday does not require a new life plan beginning Monday.

But I’m not about to pretend I’ve solved this. My brain still autopilots into unhelpful thoughts. Something isn’t working and before I’ve even figured out what happened, I’ve started building a case.

What did I forget?

What should I have done?

Why didn’t I keep up?

Why can’t I just do this?

The old questions.

The one where the answer is always the same.

Me.

I’m what’s wrong.

But now I try to catch it and ask different questions.

Not why can’t I make myself do this?

Or, what kind of person would let it get this bad?

Just:

Does this work for me? Why or why not?

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I’m spending the next several weeks on this topic.

I’ve been writing about what happens when the rules go away but the grading doesn’t. The voice in your head that keeps checking, correcting, explaining, measuring, and asking what you did wrong.

I call it the Internal Auditor.

This is the second piece in that series. If you recognize yours, stick around.