Perfectionism

a work in progress

On the terrifically long flight back from Spain, repeating the same hour eight times, my eyes tired of reading. In an effort to stay awake, I decided to start an audiobook. This strategy paralleled my departure strategy, when I listened to The Power of Now specifically to bore me to sleep. Eckhart Tolle’s voice is strangely monotone and hushed, and he says the same thing approximately one million times over the course of the book (spoiler). It has an effective, hypnotic effect.

In The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control, Katherine Morgan Schafler’s voice is also rather unique - young, and New York-ish with a heavy dose of ASMR - her ’s’ and terminal sounds often sound like her mouth is full. Her voice often fades out as she finishes a thought, which makes you listen a little closer for what might come next.

Is there more?

Did I hit the ‘volume down’ button?

What comes next?

The content matches the delivery in that it is kind, and nurturing, and yet the sour truth of the tale she tells kept me riveted as I made the last four painful hours home from New Jersey on a leg where I did not spring for extra legroom.

I don’t think I have negative connotations about perfectionists, or perfectionistic tendencies. But also prior to listening to this book, I imagined that perfectionism was consistent with having high standards. Over time at home, in college, in passing, and certainly in a wide range of work engagements, I’ve encountered people whose perfectionism was problematic for them, as they were disappointed by others not meeting their standards, or problematic for the others, for the same reason. I’ve seen my own father struggle with how to best organize and categorize family photos, using filenames like BILL_KAREN_ZOO_CHICAGO_SPRING_1984 and KAREN_HIGHCHAIR_PUDDING_FACE_POLAROID_1982. These two are easy, but when it comes to painstakingly categorizing the thousand photographs of Rome, it gets bananas. Naming is easy.

But then, how are they filed?

How do we categorize things?

What is the best way?

After all of that, I couldn’t find the pudding face image, so here I am exploring advanced calculus in 1982.