Katherine Morgan Schafler - The Perfectionists Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

The night before our wedding, my husband and I decided to sleep separately, so that each of us could spend the evening in the most relaxing way possible before our big day. I returned home from the rehearsal dinner at around 10:30 p.m., walked my dogs while responding to emails, and then worked out.

After working out, I took an amazing shower, rewrapped the gifts I was giving to my bridesmaids the following day (the gift wrap from the store graffitied the paper with so much tape, and it was all too kitschy in the first place), filed some clinical notes, edited my vows in bed for about twenty minutes, checked my emails again, and then drifted off to sleep a touch after 2:00 a.m. It was, by all accounts, the perfect night.

Perfectionists are not balanced people, and thats okay. Subscribing to prepackaged notions of balance and generic wellness when they dont fit who you are isnt being healthy, its being obedient. I wrote this book for the women who are done being good. I wrote this book for the women who are ready to set themselves free.

If you were sitting across from me on my therapist couch right now, we could share confidential eye rolls over how youve been told ad nauseam that perfectionists set themselves free by getting rid of their perfectionism. Im telling you right now that that will never work.

Writing I will not be a perfectionist one thousand times on the proverbial chalkboard is a complete waste of your time. So how do you set yourself free, or even begin to understand what freedom looks like for you? You start by being honest with yourself about who you are.

You admit that youd never be satisfied with an average lifeyou long to excel, and you know it. You acknowledge just how much you thrive by being pushedyou need a challenge or your boredom risks tipping over into a depressive episode. And you stop playing small and denying your giftsyou were born to shine, and you can feel it.

Until now, youve resisted your perfectionistic tendencies in response to our collective portrayal of perfectionism, which is deeply skewed and highly selective. It leads with the negative (which is true but not holistic) to demonstrate how perfectionism is bad, abruptly concluding that perfectionists are unhealthy and need to be fixed.

Interestingly (read: predictably), the push to curb perfectionism and be perfectly imperfect is directed towards women. Have you ever heard a man refer to himself as a recovering perfectionist? When Steve Jobs or Gordon Ramsay or James Cameron demand perfection, theyre exalted as geniuses in their respective fields. Where are the celebrated female perfectionists?

You could argue that Martha Stewart built an empire on her perfectionism and is perhaps the most celebrated female perfectionist of our time, but notice what her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, centers itself on: brunch recipes in a pinch, all things holiday entertaining, paint palettes that pop, weddings. These are archetypal homemaker interests. Martha Stewart wears her perfectionism on her sleeve to roaring acclamation instead of being told to be more balanced (i.e., temper her powerful drive) because her interests stay within the realm of what is acceptable for women to be publicly ambitious about. None of this is a coincidence.

Part of the urging to stamp out perfectionism in women arises because perfectionism is a powerful energy. Like every kind of power (the power of wealth, words, beauty, love, etc.), perfectionismif you dont understand how to harness it correctlywill corrupt your life. Perfectionism makes an excellent servant and a terrible master; lets also be honest about that.

Can we just say it?

We both know that in the past, your perfectionism has tortured you in every arena of life: professionally, romantically, artistically, physically, spiritually. Thats because you didnt understand it as a power and a gift, you didnt respect it, you tried to deny it, and you reduced it to a proclivity for tidiness and punctuality, though real perfectionism has little to do with either. The more you pushed your perfectionism away, the harder it pushed back. You couldnt get rid of your perfectionism if you tried (and try you did) because its a fundamental component of who you are.

Lucky for you, the deepest, most powerful parts of who you are never abandon you. Whatever you did to numb out or downplay or otherwise mute the powerful energy inside you that you didnt know what to do with, I did it, too. Its okay; none of it worked. Thankfully, your perfectionism is still intact, and now you have a real solution to your problem.