In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, there is a filler scene where all of the third-year students have to face a boggart as part of their Defense Against the Dark Arts final. (For those who weren't obsessed with Harry Potter like I was, a boggart is a magical creature that transforms into your worst fear.) When Hermione, the poster girl for perfectionism, reemerges from her exam, she's hysterical:
Hermione did everything perfectly until she reached the trunk with the Boggart in it. After about a minute inside it, she burst out again, screaming.
‘Hermione!’ said Lupin, startled. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘P-P-Professor McGonagall!’ Hermione gasped, pointing into the trunk. ‘Sh-she said I’d failed everything!’
It took a little while to calm Hermione down.
Prisoner of Azkaban - page 234 - Bloomsbury - chapter 16, "Professor Trelawney's Prediction"
Her friends and classmates make fun of her, but I can relate to Hermione's fear a little too well.
I have always been a perfectionist. It didn't matter if I was facing down a seventh grade volleyball game or a graduate school term paper -- if it wasn't flawless, I wasn't happy.
On the one hand, that's helped get me to where I am today. I work hard and push myself even harder -- sometimes too hard -- but it usually pays off. On the other, it's also given me an intense fear of failure.
Small things that I know I can do well don't give me any anxiety, nor do new challenges where I don't care how many times I mess up before I succeed. But heaven forbid I attempt something big, where I feel like people will judge me or my talent based on the result. I either procrastinate until I'm at high alert panic mode and my deadline is just hours away, or I won't even try.
(As I write, by the way, this piece is due in about 3.5 hours. I've known about the deadline for ages.)
My perfectionism is at its worst when it comes to my writing, which is very closely tied to my perception of myself. My wakeup call was the second workshop assignment for a creative nonfiction class my senior year of college. It was far from the first creative writing class I'd taken and my writing had been workshopped many times before, so it wasn't the critique aspect that scared me. It was the fact that I had chosen to write a personal essay about race and I wanted it to be absolutely perfect.
The Monday night before it was due, I stayed up until around two o'clock in the morning, writing and re-writing and beating myself up for how awful it was. If I could have given up, I would have -- but it was a class assignment and I risked failing the class if I didn't turn it in. Actually failing a class was 1000x worse than people thinking my writing was awful. I had no choice.
I handed over the piece the next day with a dire warning to my classmates and professor that it was a first draft, very rough, and I wasn't happy with it. A week later, when we met again for workshop, I spent the entire class period in a nervous sweat.
They loved it. There was definitely room for improvement, but as they spoke, I started to see strengths in the passages I had mentally torn apart. Their critiques made the essay even better. Reassured by their responses -- maybe I wasn't horrendous -- I submitted an edited version of the essay to a conference five months later. It was accepted two months after that.
Had I not been forced to turn it in for class, I would have been so overly critical that the essay never would have left my computer. I never would have had the opportunity to travel across the country to present it, nor would I have known that it would resonate strongly enough with someone for them to want to publish it in a journal.
Even with that example in mind, I still have difficulty pushing past my fear. My life goal since I was five years old has been to publish a novel. To date, I have written two and queried zero because I'm terrified of being told that I'm not good enough to achieve the dream I've had for so long.
In my head, it's better not to attempt anything and keep up the shiny veneer of perfection than it is to try and fail in front of the whole world. I'm trying, in a twisted way, to protect myself. But I'm getting in my own way because of it.
I usually don't make resolutions for the new year, but for 2017 I'm making an exception. I'm done with letting the fear of failing stop me from trying in the first place. I'm going to retrain myself to see failure as a learning opportunity or a challenge instead of as a frightening setback. It's going to take awhile to change the way I think, but I have to try.
Besides, in the wise words of J.K. Rowling herself, "some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default."
Bring it on, 2017.
