Elizabeth Tallent - Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism

Gloria

In theory, the self-presentational style of the self-critical perfectionist should be characterized by a defensive concealment of an imperfect self.

Paul L. Hewitt et al.

I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see the scars, failure, disorder, distortion. Perfection is a kind of order, like overall harmony, and so on. These are things someone forces onto things. A free human doesnt desire such things.

Yohji Yamamoto

And then to want and not to haveto want and wanthow that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

Virginia Woolf

Notoriously, we cant finish a thing. The truest perfectionist, the one Im failing to be, would still be rewriting this sentence. As a perfectionist I leave a lot to be desired, and if you leave a lot to be desired, youre unlikely to run out of desire. You might even be said to have found a way to live and breathe desire, because if the price of never-ending desire is never getting to the end of anything, perfectionism willingly pays up. Is it a raw deal? In a boon rare among afflictions, to name yourself its sufferer is to flatter your own character as uncompromising, bound to impossibly high standards: Im such a perfectionist fails to sound sick. Fails, transparently. The end all striving aims for shines from its name: perfection. To which the individual ist is attached. What kind of wound is obsession if its object deserves every ounce of effort expended in its pursuit, what damage is done? From a detached vantage point perfectionist agitation might seem less a disorder than the consequence of carrying ardor for (lets say) beauty to an exhausting extreme. But Im not very detached about perfectionism, Im like a person whose house is on fire writing a book about fire, its been present, a factor in my life, since my first breathlabor, then, is considered an experience a woman will want to forget, and when a voice says Wake up, Mother, and meet your little girl, my mother hears her own mother summoned, but thats impossible, the little my mother knows about the world she has just been returned to includes the certainty that within it her mother is far away, and she suddenly wants her, and follows her (could almost catch hold of the hem of her dress) out of the darkthe dark has not been dispelled; it furs in from either side till there is nothing left of her mother, and she wants her, and she wants her, and she wants her, and she wants her, and she wants her. Twilight sleep, the doctors nickname for the dark. You will be awake throughout but wont remember a thing. Without her glasses my mother is drastically nearsighted but her gaze implies conformance to the nurses wish that my mother behold ____________ . The nurse is fooled, after all in another feint at compliance my mother has managed to sit up, how can my mother fade back into hiding if shes being monitored by this person in charge of needles and pulses. As so often when confronted with a person who assumes their superiority to her, my mother experiences the temptation to flatter and if need be shore up a superiority she secretly rejects, in this case the temptation to flatter is compounded by the others having cornered my mother in bed, where she is by definition the weaker, at the mercy of others decisions. Even as my mothers nearsightedness keeps ____________ at blurred bay, her defiance sharpens. Go away, she thinks dangerously. In my mothers experience what people most loathe having pointed out is the specific manner in which they are annoying you, and though her perfectionism specializes in exact descriptions of others transgressions, she long ago learned to keep these to herself, besides which Go away would suggest a power my mothers role as patient is assumed to have stripped from her, the power of determining what shall and shall not happen to her. My mother is cross-stitching xs of silence across the loophole in self-control the words want to burst through when Go away fizzles out and in its stead looms a wobbly readiness, my mother reaches for the cats-eye glasses on the bedside table and fits them on, the world teeters on the brink of, of, of, the pink corner is folded back on a face no more familiar than if the nurse were offering her a root pulled from the ground.

The nurses expression is pure supposed to.

What?

Supposed to reach for it.

The nurses expression declares this scene will unfold.

My mother has to get out of this.

How.

Tell me how.

Shes trapped.

For my mother a great deal has changed since she put on her cats-eye glasses. Shes, at least momentarily, bewildering to the nurse: because so natural a gesture is meant to occur instantaneously, my mothers failure to lift her arms is starker than she would have deemed possible, more arresting; in the minds of both women, my mother is noticeably not holding out her arms. Until now the nurse has been unaware that a mothers declining to take her newborn is even possible, but if the nurse has learned one thing in her first week on the ward, its that the unforeseen is best absorbed blandly. Astonishment is reserved for the instant youre safely out of the patients ken; and what is the look on the mothers face, the nurse wonders, how exactly would you describe it, in recounting this episode to the other, more experienced nurses shes going to want to be able to say it was a look of this, it was a look of that; of, ofrevulsion, she tries; Really? say the colleagues in her head; shes new, shes not going to want to confess I had no idea what the look was of, no idea what to do nextbut she does, oh she does, ventriloquizing for the baby Hello, Mama. The tense origami cap on the nurses updo emanates more authority than resides in my mothers entire vacated body. My mother has suffered before from the spruce correctness of the immaculate, their entitlement to your future, their indulgent needlingthe nurse says again, puzzledly: Hello, Mamathe implication of your being deficient, having forgotten or neglected or otherwise missed the boat, and when the nurse imbues the third Hello, Mama with playacted desperation, my mother responds with expressionlessness. With a person as nice as this nurse, you cant give an inch, my mother knows, or niceness will eat you alive, and by continuing to gaze in the general direction the nurse wants her to look in my mother fends off creeping, intensifying niceness. But this strategy backfires, gazing in the general direction of lets details squeeze past my mothers defenses, damp cowlicks, skin of briny crimson, whys it so dark, my father likes to say my mothers as white as if shes never seen the sun, hes the proud curator of the details of her, certain aspects he likes to repeatedly announce, like the never-seen-the-sun whiteness she may have failed to notice about herself, in praise of her skin the Tennesseeism never seen the sun is trotted out and he either cant tell or doesnt notice its leaving her cold, where is my mother living in the metaphor, underground?; the parting between its lips so tiny an apple seed could barely slip through; it is scratched all over; it manages a rasping note; the gesture my mother is required to make is re-hung in the air by the nurses hope that now, surely, now the baby has issued its little plea the mothers heart will melt, but the No! of revulsion is harsher than ever, it hurts to swallow, from twilit obscurity she drags a factif her throat is raw she must have been screaming. Was she alone? In a blazing room? Hands in restraints? Is this remembering? They said she wouldnt. To her own surprise the nurse finds she has other tricks up her sleeve, the situation issure is!far from hopeless,