On my dormant (hopefully not extinct!) podcast, I had Dr. Ellen Hendriksen on as a guest to discuss her first book, How to Be Yourself, about dealing with social anxiety and the penchant many of us have for self-doubt and self-criticism. Her second book, How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists, shifts its focus to the perfectionist in most of us, if not all of us, running through enough facets of perfectionism that you’re very likely to find something in here that applies to your own life.
Full disclosure: I haven’t met Dr. Hendriksen, but I know her brother well enough that I have stayed at his house and discussed dinosaurs with his kids.
Perfectionism isn’t an actual diagnosis, although it can be a symptom of or just come along with some psychological conditions, including anxiety and depression. Hendriksen makes it clear up front that she is talking about a sort of small-p perfectionism here, the sort that can show up in just about anybody, whether or not you’re dealing with anything else at the same time. The little voice that won’t let you forget something you did that wasn’t perfect, or that won’t let you try something because you might not do it perfectly? That’s her target, with some easy to implement tips to get around that voice, since, if you’ve heard it, you know ignoring it doesn’t work. It’s a narrow focus that works in the book’s favor, especially since she still covers a lot of ground in a modest page count.
Hendriksen begins by comparing two iconic perfectionists, Walt Disney and Fred (as in Mister) Rogers. Both were successful in their lines of work because they were so exacting, with high expectations of others and perhaps even high expectations of themselves. The difference is that Disney was, by this account, a rather miserable person, and equally miserable to be around, while Rogers remains famous for his magnanimous and empathic nature, not just on air but in his everyday life. The argument here is that Rogers was a paragon of self-acceptance and self-compassion, while Disney never learned those skills.
I certainly recognized myself in several chapters of How to Be Enough, whether it was the way I am now or the way I was when I was younger. The way Disney and others in the book would lash out at others was definitely me earlier in my career and personal life; it took a lot of therapy and practice to accept that my own failings weren’t always someone else’s fault, and that others didn’t have to live up to my arbitrary and often ridiculous standards, nor was it right to be rude or unpleasant even if they did do something wrong. People make mistakes. It’s a platitude to say to err is human, of course, but it’s not a matter of divine forgiveness to brush it off and move on; it’s just being a decent person, whether it’s to your colleague or some random customer service person on the phone – or to yourself, which is just as much a focus of this book as how you treat others.
Perhaps the greatest value in How to Be Enough for me was to see that things I always thought were unusual about my brain are apparently pretty common. She cites many examples of people dealing with intrusive thoughts of ‘mistakes’ from earlier in life, even childhood, and often needing to clear those thoughts with a profanity or a shake of the head or something similar. I do that all the fucking time, often over things that happened 40 years ago. She also has several people describe how external pressures deterred them from pursuing whatever subject or skill they excelled at, whether it was straight burnout or the weight of expectations that they’d be perfect or else they failed. For me, it happened with math first, and then STEM as a whole – I was good at them at an early age, and so the spotlight was increasingly on me for that, and anything less than a perfect grade or score was a disappointment. I loved math, both applied and theoretical, and enjoyed almost all science (except biology, not mathy enough) and anything relating to coding. By the time I got out of high school, I was so over being the math kid, or dealing with everyone’s expectations that I’d become a scientist or a doctor, that I went completely the other way into the soft sciences – political science first (‘government’ at my college, which was more akin to political philosophy), then sociology and economics, which are about as soft as you can get. I took one math class, for fun, and of course I enjoyed it because it didn’t matter at all how I did. If I could do it all over again, I’d major in applied math, because I would have absolutely loved it and probably would have done really well as a result, but my experiences as a kid – especially those god damned math fairs they held in my county – made math very un-fun for a while.
How to Be Enough covers a lot of ground in only about 260 pages. There’s a chapter on why we procrastinate and how to get around it; on how perfectionism makes us take fun activities and turn them into tasks, even scolding ourselves for doing things that are fun and nothing more; and on how it’s okay to like doing something even if you’re not good at it. That last one is definitely aimed at me; I have a lot of hobbies, and when I pursue one, I go all in, because I want to keep getting better. I don’t like doing things I don’t do well. It’s why I seldom enjoy dancing (unless I’ve had a few), which of course is a very common condition and which Hendriksen covers in the book rather uncomfortably. Some of the problems she describes are inward-focused, where we judge ourselves to a ridiculous standard and thus lose pleasure or interest in something, while others are more outward-focused, where we believe others are judging us and thus we lose pleasure or interest in something. It all stems from the same source, and the result is the same: We are less happy, and we do less of the stuff we want to do. The way Hendriksen structured How to Be Enough should let anyone who deals with this issue, no matter how much or how specific, find something to help them break out of the perfectionism trap.
Next up: I’m halfway through W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, and I think I hate it.
