Trap Game.

I’m realizing tonight that one of the many pitfalls of unchecked perfectionism is the way my psyche overcompensates when I experience rejection.

Not content to simply examine the parts of myself that may have led to the rejection, instead I consider the whole of my being as a flawed project which must be scrapped entirely and started anew. I ignore the advice of my handpicked personal thought committees that tell me that I only require a slight change here, a minor tweak there, and I tear the blueprints off the backlighting in a dramatic fashion. I fire my entire creative staff and retreat to the garage where I first started, convinced that this time yes this time I will get it exactly right.

I am still trying to determine how I reinvent myself after three years of being an underwriting technical assistant. Pulled into the wake of that thought process is the more dangerous idea that I need to reinvent myself as a whole being, that even my so-called positive personality traits need to be considered expendable in order to accomplish something resembling progress. If I am compassionate, if I am caring; I contemplate what would happen if I consciously and with deliberate effort threw these qualities away. I contemplate if my value system is unsound. If I find some worth in “being myself” I now ask if I would be happier and more fulfilled being somebody else.

And when I protest that this is an absurd idea, that I couldn’t possibly force myself to undergo a transformation into my own polar opposite and that even if I could the degree of self-deception would ultimately shred my entire mental faculty…when I voice this protest, the wounded perfectionist replies “Well, what you’re doing right now certainly isn’t working.”

I am actually having this debate. My god, I’m really having this debate. I am actually debating whether it is more satisfactory to be a flawed version of who I want to be or a possibly less flawed version of who I have no desire to be.

On top of that, I’m mediating the debate as well, and although it might seem to be a conflict of interest it is actually an interest of conflict.