I speak from personal experience when I say I don’t know if you can be born a Perfectionist or if you develop it in life. 

What I do know is that once it has a grip on you, there’s no letting you go. There is no taking it easy. 

Only the tightening of the grip on your neck. 

Perfectionism is a bitter-sweet pill that pulls you into a tough spot. You are in a competition with everyone. Your friends, family, and even random strangers. 

There is this unexplainable urge to best everyone. Always wanting to come out on top. If there is a record that has been made, we have this urge to break it every single time. 

However, like a bottomless pit, hunger is never satisfied. In fact, satisfaction doesn’t exist in our dictionary. Because we can never fully attain it. 

If you think perfectionism and high standards are the same thing, I tell you are mistaken. 

Perfectionists do have high standards but everyone with high standards isn’t under the grip of perfectionism. 

Our standards are forever sky high like the tower of babel reference in the Holy Bible and there is no room for self forgiveness or love. 

We do not love ourselves because when we look in the mirror, there is nothing to love. The only reflection we see is the image of others who are better than us and until we best them, we will never behold what we look like and frankly speaking, we do not want to.

Rather than chant, mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all. We chant mirror mirror on the wall who is the most perfect of them all. 

And once an image appears, we make it our life mission to come out on top and if we can’t, we suffer a fate worse than death or at least that’s what the voices tell us. 

The voices who are the only true friend or foe depending on the day. Because only it can understand what perfectionism means to us, we see it as a motivator even if it is to our detriment. Better that than the chant of

“Slow down, you’ll be fine.” 

Although your intentions may be clean, what it portrays is settling for mediocrity which is a perfectionist worst nightmare. 

We never settle for less as we believe mediocrity is a word developed for the average person and we are more than average in every sense of the word. 

The ideal car for the perfectionist will be equipped with everything except brakes. Forever stepping on the accelerator, we forget we even have brakes so we never use it. 

The best motivator for a perfectionist is to tell us we can’t and we will prove to you more than we can. 

Always seeking the mirage of the next best thing, we lose the good things in our line of sight. We are nomads in some sort unable to stay put. 

Do you now see why it is the worst vice of all? 

Author’s Note

I’ve had this in my drafts for like a months and finally decided it was time to let it go.