Raise your hand if you are a recovering perfectionist? Yes, that’s my hand held high above my head.
If you’re anything like me, being and acting perfect was an elaborate ruse of smoke and mirrors. It required acting in ways that weren’t authentic for the sake of being right. It labeled things and people as good or bad. It put value on looking calm, cool, and collected at all times no matter what.
Beneath the veneer of perfection, I oscillated between being completely paralyzed and aggressively overcompensating by trying to do it all. I was locked and loaded with self loathing and doubt. I cowered in fear of the nasty little “F” word coming anywhere near me. Like a shadow growing larger on the wall with each step toward the victim, FAILURE was a cruel villain of unearthly proportion.
Even now, I get a little itchy when I think about failing. But fortunately, construction taught me about the value of making mistakes. Of blowing it. And of brushing myself off and trying again.
I will never forget the day that I had a face off with my perfectionist tendencies. I was painting a wall in a client’s home. High atop a 12′ ladder, I was cutting the line from the wall to the ceiling with my paintbrush. It had to look sharp. It was just beyond my reach so it was impossible for me to keep a steady hand. Precariously wobbling, I kept going over the line with paint but no matter what, it wasn’t good enough. The truth was that I needed help and I couldn’t do the job. Stubbornly, I kept trying determined to make a damn straight line. As I redid it again, staring fiercely at my shaking hand, I lost my balance. As though I was thrown off the side of a ship, I grabbed anything I could to avoid the drop down to the wood floor below. As luck would have it, a window sill sat beneath the spot where I had been painting my perfectionism on the wall. And it saved me from a disastrous fall.
As I bring my story, Under Construction, into the world this autumn, it is not lost on me that I wrote a book about making mistakes and being resilient. It has been my journey into building that helped me see myself as a crazy, imperfect project. By learning a trade that I had no prior experience in, I forced myself to get comfortable with failure. From cutting boards too short to missing the stud with the nail, I messed up daily on the job site. It takes this kind of consistent practice to move beyond the constraints of a perfectionist paradigm. And it really helps to have a mentor who can forgive you when you goof up. Who can help you take yourself less seriously, too.
So let’s work together to welcome the “F” word into our vocabulary. To say it with a smile rather than a grimace.
My name is Julia Harriet and I fail all the time. And I don’t let that stop me from going right back out and trying again. Here’s my hand if you need one – from one recovering perfectionist to another.
