I remember being in my freshman dorm doing a chemistry 102 problem set in the common area with my friend Heather. We were only assigned a handful of the problems at the end of the chapter to work on but Heather was doing all of them. I asked her why. Without looking up from her work, she said, “I’m a perfectionist.” 

I was insulted.* Her tone was one of superiority, as if to say, “Unlike you, I actually care about learning so I’m going the extra mile.” To describe oneself as perfectionist can sound like a brag. It can also sound like a cliched stock answer to an interview question. Spud from Trainspotting knows what I’m talking about.

* I also remember what I wanted to say to her at the time: “Really? A perfectionist with a 2.7 GPA?” It would have been a sick burn and very mean.

I’m reluctant to describe myself as a perfectionist because it almost sounds like I’m saying, “I strive for perfection.” You could look at the state of my apartment and say, “That’s a whole hell of a lot of dirty dishes, unread books, and takeout containers for a perfectionist.” But perfectionism isn’t about perfection. It’s not ambition or competitiveness. It’s not about vanity or keeping up appearances. For me, perfectionism is tied in with the anxiety issues that I’ve dealt with my entire life.

In the oft name-checked book Flow, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about several different types of people experiencing optimal performance. I was particularly interested in his descriptions of rock climbers. It’s ostensibly a very dangerous sport so you’d think that its participants would be thrill seekers or adrenaline junkies. In Csikszentmihalyi’s estimation, however, the optimal experience comes from taking every precaution with their equipment and skills. It comes from minimizing risk.

That’s what perfectionism is for me: minimizing risk. It’s minimizing the risk of embarrassment, failure, or criticism. It’s setting high expectations and allowing little room for forgiveness if they aren’t met.

Who knows where it comes from, but it has to be a universal experience, though, right? I can’t be so supremely sensitive that it’s just me who can remember every single social blunder he made from middle school until now. It can’t just be me who remembers a particularly harshly graded paper from Mr. Turk in AP English. Nor can it be me who makes a mistake in the present, sighs, and says to himself, “Welp there’s the thing I’m going to be obsessing over for the next three weeks.”

My first and perhaps most intense experience with perfectionism was in high school. I had to get good grades. I had to get all A’s. I had to get into a good college and to get into a good college, you needed good grades. I wasn’t the valedictorian, I allowed myself some wiggle room, but I damn well had to be in the top ten in my class, ideally the top five. I could never slip. I thought anything less than an Ivy League College would spell disaster for my entire life.

Outside of school, I felt the need to be the perfect kid. Never rebel. Don’t break any rules. Don’t drink. Don’t do drugs. I lived in fear of my parents’ disapproval. (All these years later, I realize I really could have used a fuck-up sibling to level set my parents’ expectations. They really had no idea how good they had it.)

When I finally got to college, I majored chemical engineering. I was good at science and math and everyone seemed impressed that that’s what I was going to do. I never liked it, but I refused to drop out because to drop out would have been admitting failure, that I couldn’t handle it. Never mind that choosing a major I actually liked would have been an understandable and mentally healthy thing to do.

After college I moved to New York and within a year had started doing something that I wanted to do for as long as I can remember: stand-up. This led to sketch comedy and improv. I did open mikes and sketch groups and improv practices groups. For over a decade, maybe more, I was out every night doing something: taking a class, seeing a show, handing out flyers in Times Square for a spot in the back of a hamburger restaurant.

When I look back at those years, I actually feel like I wasn’t driving myself that crazy with perfectionism. I feared bombing and I definitely beat myself up for bad shows. I procrastinated writing new material out of fear of the blank page. I fell back on tired jokes that I knew would get a laugh. But even in those moments there was always a goal to progress or get better at the craft of comedy. It was that goal that sustained me through years – many many years – of painfully bad improv before it started to click.

It’s strange that I wasn’t crazy perfectionistic about comedy because it was so important to me. Because a big part of perfectionism is about stakes.

Earlier I mentioned that in high school I was worried about my grades all the time. The reason is that it’s kind of all I had going for me at the time. I didn’t put much stake in things like my appearance, my social standing, or dating. It wasn’t that those things weren’t important to me, I just feel like my environment decided some things for me early on. Having been made fun of for my man boobs since as long as I can remember, I never really identified with my physical appearance. Crying after striking out to make the last out in the little league championship game let me know that athletics was probably not my path either. And during adolescence I was a late blooming practicing Catholic attending an all boys school. I was willing to put dating on the back burner for a while.

When the expectations are low, perfectionism doesn’t enter into the equation. Mediocrity is acceptable.

No date to the junior prom? Whatever, I wasn’t expecting one.

Penty, what are you wearing? Clothes, asshole.

Penty, how could you drop the pass?! Uh, because I’m, like, really bad at football.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention a few things that I’m irrationally perfectionist about. I wouldn’t want anyone to ever have to watch me roll out a pie crust that isn’t coming together. I’ve also had to accept that I shouldn’t attempt video games made anytime after 1985. And for the sake of my blood pressure and anyone in my general vicinity, I have decided to never attempt golf.

But I still struggle with perfectionism on an almost daily basis.

In my work as a web developer, I get assigned a project and I usually feel like a deer in the headlights for anywhere from an hour to a couple of days. If I have to start a project from scratch, I stare at a blank screen and wonder about the best way to start. Other times I’ll be asked to pitch in on a project. I’ll look at code that doesn’t seem one hundred percent necessary, which causes more paralysis as I go through a whole mental process of wondering why it would be here in the first place? Is it a mistake or was it put there to solve a problem that was solved before I even started working on this?

As I get older, perfectionism is intertwined with my hypochondria. Any injury or ailment can feel like a moral failing. Why didn’t I take some precaution to prevent this? What the hell is wrong with me?

And these days, in addition to improv, I’ve been focusing my creative efforts on storytelling and blogging.

The perfectionism I feel with these is slightly different. There’s an inner judgement when i don’t have anything that I think is worthy of sharing or writing about. Though, much like with stand-up, I feel like there is a goal that I am aiming for. They both remind me fo the adage of the person who asks a sculptor, how do you sculpt a statue? And the sculptor answers, “I start with a big block of marble and chip away anything that doesn’t look like a statue.” In the storytelling community in particular I can craft something through repeated tellings of an imperfect story in front of an understanding audience.

But I still have my weird perfectionist tendencies.

When I tell a story, I often need to type it out into a Word Document that can’t be single spaced because that’s too tight. I need to print out the pages and read them over and make notes with a red pen. And when I’m recalling the story in my mind as I tell it, I mentally picture the physical paper and where I am in the document. I’ll also write out a bulleted list of the most important beats of a story right before I tell it and if I forget a particular detail or section or turn of phrase, I’ll definitely hate myself for it.

And I’ve never written a blog post from start to finish in one burst and then published it. Not this one, not any one. If an idea for a post occurs to me I’ll write it down in a notebook. Then when I’m ready I’ll write a bunch of disjointed sentences in a TextEdit document. Later, I’ll start typing in my WordPress editor. I’ll write things just to get them down. I’ll often write the same thought twice or three times just worded differently and then I’ll decide which phrasing I like better. I’ll drag paragraphs around, reordering them, trying to find the right order so one thought flows into the next. I drag cuttable paragraphs to the bottom without deleting them outright just in case there’s something in there worth saving. Once it’s in a place that approximates an essay, I start combing through the post, deleting sentences and needless words, over and over and over again.

How do I feel about this post? It’s fine, not my best, not my worst. At least there’s a satisfaction in having written.

The good news is that perfectionism seems to be easing with age. I still feel like I should have been better and I’m still not exactly sure what better actually means. Wealthier? More successful? A more prestigious career? I still compare myself unfavorably to others. But as I go on, I realize that even the people that I compare myself to aren’t perfect and they don’t see themselves as such.

Since my mom died, all of my bitchy, whiny phone calls made in a moment of weakness have largely fallen to my cousin Donna. Several times she’s posed me this question: who would you trade places with? After the sixth or seventh time of me saying George Clooney, I finally came to the begrudging admission that you’re supposed to come to from such an obviously rhetorical question.

Ugh, no one, I guess.