Getting Over Perfection

After years of trying to achieve perfection with my website I finally have a site up and functioning. Is it perfect, hell no. The only reason its live is because I have embraced "good enough." For a perfectionist, "good enough" is a paradox, it's settling for less than the best, but also, there's often no such thing as "good enough." It's somehow both less than perfect and unattainable at the same time, which is why perfectionists often end up spiraling and stopping themselves from accomplishing anything.

I think perfectionism is a common problem among high masking AuDHD individuals, especially when you grew up with a perfectionist parent. You want to cook in the kitchen as a kid? Great, but you should do it without making a mess. Here, let me hover over you and tell you what you're doing wrong, or better yet just let me do it instead of letting you learn and develop your fine motor skills. Life is about making messes, learning, cleaning up and doing it all again, and not just when you're a kid. But not when you have a perfectionist parent. Nothing feels better to a kid with a perfectionist parent than doing something perfectly and winning that parent's approval. And nothing hacks away at your worth more than critiques and "tips" every time you do anything.

I'm sure from the perspective of the perfectionist parent doing something "right" makes them feel good, so logically it will make their kids feel good as well. Not to mention they don't want to clean up the mess, so if they can just coach their little kid to do something as well as an adult, then they can skip the mess altogether. Everybody wins right? But what makes kids happy is knowing their parents are happy with them, so when their parents are frustrated with them for being an uncoordinated child the disapproval is received loud and clear before the kid even understands what's happening. The worst part: you integrate their voice into your own head. Over time you forget its their voice. You do the cutting down before anyone else can. You nit pick at every little detail hoping to avoid them doing it. The cruel irony? That perfectionist parent is also a high masking AuDHD who knows the sting of being raised the same way and they'll never see the connection. That perfectionism can push us to cultivate impressive skills, sure, but when we live with the voice constantly questioning if we did the best we could we chronically assume we aren't as skilled or talented as we truly are. So we grow up to develop imposter syndrome. The expectation of perfection becomes engrained in our nervous systems, its a ticking time bomb that will inevitably go off when we least expect it, often after over performing for years and years through high school and college.

We don't choose when that timer hits zero. For a lot of us, like me, it hits with diagnosis. There's a slow realization that happens. You start to suspect, you research, you build your case, you talk to a specialist and even though you already knew the official validation of diagnosis hits like a tsunami. It's a flood of relief and vindication, but there's a sadness that finally settles in. You spent your whole life struggling and being mentally and emotionally beaten into silence, made fun of for the "weird" things you liked, ridiculed for being sensitive when you didn't take the teasing well. Is it any wonder so many of us end up with Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria?

Its a common phenomenon for those of us who are late diagnosed, we suddenly see the tremendous amount of effort it took to mask and somehow we were so good at pretending it wasn't there that we didn't feel the weight of it until diagnosis pointed at the and massive nervous system leach and asked "what's that?" Sort of like how you can hold yourself together until the moment someone asks you "are you okay?" and then the floodgates you've been holding closed burst open. All that effort, the years of masking and over-performing comes at a cost. You essentially go into cognitive debt in order to hide your struggles. For twenty years or more you have been borrowing bandwidth from yourself. How you ask? You gave 120% everyday since you started masking. That extra 20% had to come from somewhere. Burnout is when your nervous system forces you to pay back the debt. For many that invisible debt even develops into autoimmune disorders that will affect them the rest of their lives. And the best part is the people who watched you perform spectacularly for so long won't have any sympathy for your sudden transformation into a "useless, lazy, and unproductive" adult. Congratulations on your diagnosis. Good luck paying that cognitive debt and grieving the acceptance and understanding you never got. Oh and that perfectionism? You can keep it, no substitutions, exchanges or refunds.

In my case perfect disguised itself as "professional" and I convinced myself success hinged on my ability to do everything at a professional level. I started my HMHS Webtoon in 2020, but I jumped into it holding myself to the standard of "professional" because that's what I wanted to be. If I wanted to make a living doing what I loved I needed to deliver a professional standard comic. That meant 50-60 panels per chapter every week, because thats what the professional Webtoon creators delivered. I worked 8 hours a day on that comic minimum, because the artists who were paid by Webtoon worked full time on their comics. Can you guess what happened? Yeah, I overworked myself. I eventually went on hiatus because I told myself I wasn't allowed to work on any of the things I loved and was good at because they weren't earning me money. The all-or-nothing-perfectionism was cancerous. I tried to start a copywriting business to prove I could do "a real job" and actually make money. This was right around the time of my autism diagnosis. I would focus on Neurodivergent copywriting and put my newly discovered sense of self to work and...BOOM.

Well great. Now you're burnt out, barely functioning, and deconditioning from your fitness intensive lifestyle which kept your secretly hypermobile body stable. But you still have all the same expectations for yourself because you're still desperate to prove yourself to the perfectionist parent. Only those expectations now require exponentially more effort...because you're in burnout. Unfortunately, we all know where spending more while you're still in debt gets you. That's right, deeper into debt! Would you look at that, you're getting nowhere. But you've got to keep trying even if you're failing because the only thing worse than failing is not trying at all. Turns out the life skills your perfectionist parent taught you aren't worth shit when you're burnt out and chronically ill. So you have to figure it out on your own and do something no one else in your family is willing to do...therapy.

The best thing to happen to you after diagnosis will inevitably be therapy, ideally with a Neuodivergent Specialist. You'll finally realize you have to stop seeking the approval of people who don't even try to understand you or your struggles, because every time you offer up your efforts as proof that you're trying you're met with criticisms or doubts anyway and if digging yourself deeper into burnout isn't going to make them proud you might as well accept not making them proud and finally take care of yourself. You have to release the death grip on their approval and acknowledge how much damage it has done to you. You have to take responsibility for believing in yourself, atone (to yourself) for giving up on yourself, and take accountability for undoing all the damage BY YOURSELF. The solution: letting go of perfect and redefining what productive looks like for you. It turns out when you're burnt out REST IS PRODUCTIVE. The only way any of us in burnout are going to get out of it is if we let ourselves rest. It's a shame that is the hardest thing we can ask of ourselves. For a lot of us we simply can't do it until our bodies give us no choice. Mine gave me no choice, but that's a can of worms for another blog post.

My endeavor of having a website has gone through several false starts. I even had a really gorgeous site built and almost ready to launch until I found out the host company was based in a country committing genocide. Free Palestine. Anyway, I suffered from the professional compulsion through a few different attempts to build my own website. Because I grew up a perfectionist I developed a knack for teaching myself how to do literally anything I wanted to do. But there's simply no need to set myself a task of climbing a mountain just because I technically can when I can choose a walk up a little hill that gets me to the same destination: a working website. And in this case "good enough" is a functioning website built off a simple template that does what it needs to do. I don't need to have a full ecommerce platform to be a legitimate author and artist doing what I do best. Maybe at some point down the road I will, but now is not that point. I was so caught up by the idea that I needed to launch some complete thriving business that I just didn't have a website for YEARS. Even this time as I restarted I found myself going down the rabbit hole of finding out what the best strategy was for businesses. Should I have one website for my fantasy books/content and another website entirely for my pet loss journal and grief journey? I finally realized, NO. I just need a dumping ground for everything ME. Whether you found my tiktoks about grieving my cats or you ended up with a copy of Hidden Magic and wanted to find out more about me. I remembered back in high school, maybe just a year into writing Hidden Magic, when I was avid reader of the Twilight books. I would check Stephenie Meyer's website weekly for updates on New Moon and then Eclipse's release, Stephenie's dream cast for movies based on her books, etc. That's all I need this site to be for now. It just needs to exist. For me and for you. And that's good enough for now.