A friend at work described me as a perfectionist, and it made me think … am I? Still?
I can see how co-workers see me as a perfectionist. I volunteer to do quality checks on their work, and my quality checks are brutal beat downs that include unsolicited lessons on colons vs semi-colons.
Yet my emails listing their errors are full of typos and sentence fragments. Hypercritical for them, hypocritical for me. I don’t expect perfection in myself.
I find physical perfection off-putting. Physically perfect people are not to be trusted. I don’t expect physical perfection in myself and find it repellent in others.
Perhaps I am following Mom’s path. She was a life-long perfectionist, and then she slacked off. I remember the day I was wallpapering her bathroom and she said, “Oh, it doesn’t need to line up exactly.” I spun around and gaped at her, and she explained she was giving up on perfection in her old age. I believe she was sixty.
I wonder if when I was young, I had physical imperfections I could count on two hands, for perfection was attainable. Now that I’m old I can see how futile it is. I wonder if there are any aged perfectionists. They must be tremendously unhappy.