Three Beautiful Things 08-09-2025: The Perils of Perfectionism Are On My Mind

 1. Online, its title is "The Pain of Perfectionism". In the hard copy August 11, 2025 issue of The New Yorker, it's titled "Enemy of the Good". It's an article by Leslie Jamison in which she interviews and discusses the work of two psychology specialists, Gordon Flett and Paul Hewitt, whose life work has focused on the problem of perfectionism.

On our sibling outing to Clark Fork, the subject of perfectionism came up and we discussed it in relation to how it can contribute to crippling chronic clinical depression. 

I was blown away by the timing of this New Yorker article arriving in my mailbox Friday and was grateful for how it added to my meager understanding of perfectionism and how Christy, Carol, and I were right on the money in ways we discussed it in the car. 

Flett and Hewitt's work goes back over thirty years. Rather than go into detail about it in this blog post, I'll just say that perfectionism contributes to mental illness, physical ailments, and suicide rates. 

I came away from this article assured of what I've contemplated in the past: perfectionism is a demon.

If you'd like to read this article, I can email you a PDF copy of it, or I can send it to you through Facebook Messenger. I cannot text it to you. 

I don't know if this article is behind a paywall. If you'd like to check it out, here's the link: https://tinyurl.com/v6rpvmsf

2. As I read this article, I realized that I've been more plagued by people I thought (rightly or wrongly) expected perfection from me than by perfectionist tendencies within myself. 

I'll leave it at that, except to say that feeling these expectations from others (whether they had them or not) has never done me a lick of good. 

3. I also thought today about how, when I was working, I grew increasingly resistant to the idea of rigor. I guess I began to think that possibly rigor, making high demands on students, might be an enemy of the good. Couldn't students learn and perform well, I used to wonder, without the pressure of rigorous demands on them? 

I suppose some of this questioning had to do with the ways that enforcing rigor, given my personality, didn't come to me readily.  

About thirty years ago, I first read the poem "Her Right Eye Catches the Lavender" and as Gerald Sterns' poem develops, the speaker of the poem self-reflects and asks: 

Why did is take so long

for me to get lenient?

From that point forward, that question repeated itself constantly inside me. 

Oh, for sure, I backslid into not being lenient from time to time, but much more than rigor, being lenient came to govern how I approached my work and my relationships with my students. 

I hoped back then that I could convince my students to be lenient with themselves as writers. I used to encourage them to sin boldly. Let it rip. I always thought I could help students more who were not cautious as they wrote than if they wrote cautiously. 

They didn't need me to expect perfection.