Why Do Perfectionists Never Feel Good Enough?

There is a kind of person who seems – at first glance – to benefit from an admirable degree of self-motivation, thoroughness and drive. They are up at dawn, they rarely take holidays, they are always sneaking in an extra hour or two of work. Their bosses are highly impressed, they are constantly promoted, their grades have been excellent since primary school, they never miss an appointment or turn in a piece of work that is less than stellar.
有一种人，乍一看，似乎受益于令人钦佩的自我激励、彻底性和干劲。他们天一亮就起床，很少休假，总是偷偷加班一两个小时。他们的老板对他们印象深刻，他们不断得到晋升，他们从小学开始就成绩优异，他们从来不会错过约会，也不会提交一份不够出色的工作。

We like to say that such a person has high standards; we might even anoint them with the term 'perfectionist.' It might seem churlish to locate any problems here. Why complain about a somewhat overzealous devotion to perfection in a troubled and lackadaisical world? There could surely be nothing too awful about high exactitude? What could be so imperfect about perfectionism?
我们倾向于认为这样的人有很高的标准；我们甚至会给他们贴上“完美主义者”的标签。在这里找问题似乎有些粗鲁。在一个混乱和懒散的世界里，为什么要抱怨对完美的过分追求呢？高精确度肯定没什么可怕的吧？完美主义有什么不完美之处呢？

The concern is not so much with the work of the perfectionist (its recipients are in a very privileged position) as with the state of their soul. Perfectionism does not – tragically – spring first and foremost from any kind of love of perfection in and of itself. It has its origins in a far more regrettable feeling of never being good enough. It is rooted in self-hatred – sparked by memories of being disapproved of or neglected by those who should have more fairly esteemed us warmly in childhood.
我们关注的并不是完美主义者的工作本身（那些接受他们工作成果的人其实处于非常优越的位置），而是他们的灵魂状态。可悲的是，完美主义并不是首先源于对完美本身的热爱。它起源于一种更令人遗憾的“永远不够好”的感觉。它植根于自我厌恶——由童年时那些本应更公平、更热情地尊重我们的人对我们的不认可或忽视的记忆引发。

We become perfectionists from a primary sense of being unworthy; uninteresting, flawed, a disappointment, a letdown, a nuisance. So powerful is this sense, so appalling is it in its pressure on our psyches, we are prepared to do more or less anything to expunge it: working at all hours, currying favour with authority, doing twice as much as the next person – these are the tools with which we seek to cleanse our apparently shamefully undeserving selves.
我们成为完美主义者，从本质上是因为感到自己不值得；无趣、有缺陷、令人失望、令人沮丧、令人讨厌。这种感觉如此强烈，对我们的心理造成如此大的压力，我们愿意做几乎任何事情来消除它：不辞辛劳地工作，讨好权威，做比别人多一倍的工作——这些都是我们用来洗刷貌似可耻的、不值得的自我的工具。

One part of the mind promises the other that the completion of the next challenge will finally usher in peace. We can be very good at pretending that our ambitions are sane. But our work has a Sisyphean dimension. No sooner have we rolled our working boulder up the hill than it will tumble back down again. There is never going to be a point of rest or a lasting feeling of completion. We are – in truth – ill rather than driven.
大脑的一部分向另一部分承诺，完成下一个挑战最终会带来平静。我们非常擅长假装我们的抱负是合乎情理的。但我们的工作有一个西西弗斯的维度。我们刚把巨石滚上山，它又要滚下来了。永远不会有休息的时刻，也不会有持久的完成感。我们实际上是生病了，而不是被驱动。

We aren't interested in perfect work at all: we are trying to escape from a feeling of being awful people – and work simply happens to be the medium through which we are striving to grow tolerable in our own eyes. But because our problem didn't begin with work, nor can work ever prove the solution. Our real goal is not, as we think, to be an ideal employee or professional, it is to feel acceptable. But responsibility for a sense of acceptance cannot be handed over to our bosses or customers or a ceaselessly demanding capitalist system; these will never let us rest easy because it is in their nature, without any evil intent, always to demand more.
We need to shift our sense of where our drive is coming from. We are not unnaturally interested in working perfectly, we are labouring under an unusually intense impression that we are dreadful people – a problem for which working harder cannot be the answer.

We need to allow ourselves to imagine that we deserved to be accepted from the start and that it cannot forever be our fault in our minds that we are not. It is not up to us to try to prove that we have a right to exist. It is asking too much of ourselves to have to experience a referendum on our legitimacy every time we hand in a report, every exam we have to pass, every customer we have to serve.

Working well is – naturally – an admirable goal. But it becomes a symptom of a mental perturbation when it becomes the cover for a secret aspiration to correct a deficit of early love.  

We should welcome an ability to tolerate periods of laziness, not because we are congenitally idle – but because it is a sign that we have learnt to speak more kindly to ourselves and to be appropriately angry with those who could not – at the outset – accept us for who we were without a surfeit of trophies and prizes.


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