If anyone knows where the perfectionist gene comes from, could you please tell me, so I can kill it? Seriously, I am willing to pay one of you genius micro-biology whatevers to locate the strand, and strip it from my genetic coding.
Looking back on my 19 years, it’s easy to see how I missed the signs. They were subtle; like not learning to tie my shoes until I was 7, and someone teaching me the “bunny-ears” method, because it never “looked right” when I did “loop-swoop-and-pull”; storming out of math class in first grade when my teacher told me I did a problem wrong; re-cutting my construction paper shapes in art class so many times that they were too small, because the edges were never straight enough for me.
I thought this was normal. Doesn’t everyone cry when their Cleopatra Halloween costume doesn’t have gold sandals with laces up to the knee? No?
I think the reason it took me so long to identify this quality, though, was the contradictive nature of my condition. When I wasn’t able to get something exactly the way I wanted it, instead of pushing forward to get it there, I just gave up. Ultimately, everything either had to be perfect, or I just stopped caring about it. This is what has given many people the impression that I go with the flow. And somewhere along the way, I began to believe them.
And yet the evil perfectionist gene still lives inside me. It tends to appear in the way only a real monster can: when I’m working on a tedious and uninteresting assignment, which is usually a paper for a subject that I’m taking not by choice.
Which brings me back to this very moment, (which is exactly 1:30AM, if you were wondering,) in which I am not writing a five-page paper on my family’s history in America that is due in 10 hours and 10 minutes. Why? Because I can’t for the life of me find a subject significant to fill up the three and a half pages I have to go. And, as a perfectionist, I won’t just fill up the space with useless information that isn’t perfectly relevant to what I have written so far.
So you see my curse? This is why I will never be able to write a book. This is why I will spend 20 minutes doing my eyeliner, only to wipe it off and before I leave. This is why I will continue to clip my nail until they bleed, because there’s still one more jagged edge to get rid of.
Please smart scientist people, can you help me? I’d really prefer not to live the rest of my life never finishing anything, because I’m afraid it’s not “perfect.”
~Becca Bleznak
Philadelphia, Pa
rebecca.bleznak@temple.edu
