People make mistakes. It’s one of the most natural things about human behavior: that we do the wrong thing here and there. While this concept is nailed into our heads growing up, it is a very hard lesson to apply, as we want to be the best form of ourselves that we can and constantly strive for perfection. This drive, while seen as noble, can come with severe consequences to one’s mental health if taken to an extreme.
Part of being a person is making mistakes so you can learn lessons and become a better person in the future. Perfectionism is a bastardization of this concept to where you can’t let go of the mistake and you are actively putting yourself down for doing said thing wrong to where it affects your mental well-being and it halts the process of lesson-learning altogether. Perfectionism makes it so you become so obsessed with the actual mistake and how awful it was that it happened that you are completely disconnected with the process of learning a lesson, improving yourself, and moving on. Perfectionism is something that I’ve struggled with all my life, and not only does it impact how you view yourself, but it puts a negative light on how you view others. Similar to its effects on the individual, perfection can place a skewed filter on one’s perspective on life to where they see others as people who are defined by their mistakes. For example, if someone continuously makes failing grades on math tests, one might be compelled to see that and think that he is of low intelligence. In reality, this person isn’t dumb, but he is a person who is making mistakes, whether it be not preparing for the tests, not listening in class, etc. Instead of defining someone by these mistakes, people need to look deeper into this person beyond mistakes and see him as an individual, like me and you, who are making errors and life and are building upon those errors to become better people. The perfectionist viewpoint blocks one’s deeper thinking to where they take peoples’ mistakes at face value instead of putting them aside and just being able to view them as people, like you and me, who are in the process of taking their flaws and improving themselves. This goes the same for moral mistakes. We are quickly to judge when someone does something despicable, like cheat in a relationship. While this is bad, this does not necessarily make the person who did it a bad person, it just makes him/her a person who did a bad thing. If people continue to view others in this perfectionist perspective, it will hinder our abilities to treat everyone the same: as learning, growing people, just like you and I.
I recently watched a documentary called (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies (http://thedishonestyproject.com/film/) that worked on uncovering the human behavior behind lying. In this, they covered the story of Marilee Jones, the former Admissions Counselor at MIT, who was fired to having lied for years about her academic credentials, when it turns out, while she did lie, it was a series of small lies she didn’t think mattered at the time. While this is an act of poor judgement, I don’t think anyone who knows her as a person and has heard her story would consider her a bad person. Near the end of her interview, she said something that interested me. She said “I used to think of the world in terms of good people and bad people, and now I of the world as [just] people” ((Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies). For me, this is an excellent representation of the breaking of the perfectionist filter of reality-- when people finally begin to view others as more than just their mistakes, they begin to see people as growing human beings who commit errors in life and learn from them.
As much as we would naturally like the view the world in terms of good and bad, life is not something you can judge in terms of black and white. There is always going to be deeper roots to a person than what you can see, and the least we can do as people is look beyond their actions and treat them as you would want to be treated.
Bibliography
(Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies. Dir. Yael Melamede. Perf. Dan Ariely. 2015. Online.
