18 Struggles Only Perfectionists Will Understand
Looking back at old stuff and deleting or throwing it out because it’s not up to par with your current works.
1. Looking back at your old stuff and deleting or throwing it out because it’s not up to par with your current work. “What was I thinking back then?” you’ll ask yourself. Instead of appreciating where you began compared to where you are, you’re slightly disgusted by the product your novice-self was putting out.
2. Taking everything to heart. Someone may jokingly make a comment about your essay, or drawing, or the décor in your home or the meal you prepared and that’s a devastating blow to your psyche. Little do they know how much thought, care and effort you put into whatever they casually poked fun at… Or how incredibly fragile/sensitive you are.
3. Wanting your work to be so flawless that a lot of your stuff goes unseen because you wouldn’t want less than picture-perfection out there to be viewed by the public, with your name attached to it.
4. In a world full of deadlines and time constraints you struggle to finish things when they’re due, because you’d rather deliver when they’re actually ready, no matter how long that takes.
5. Culture and their expectations of perfection only attribute to the madness. Everyone expects precision all of the time. Flight delayed? Outrage. Fast food order wrong? These employees are so incompetent. Make a mistake while driving? You’re at least getting a middle finger and if you can read lips, a little extra. Blunders are rarely greeted with understanding these days, and even those who don’t want to be perfect themselves expect it from anyone they interact with in society.
6. Procrastination is unavoidable but deadly because you’re already going to require longer than most to get every last detail right, and you can’t really afford any additional stalling. Though, you may just be putting whatever it is off because you’re afraid to finish and have disappointing results.
7. Worrying that people are annoyed with you because you instinctually corrected them. (Members of the Grammar Police Force know all about this.)
8. Speaking of Grammar Police, having to cut ties with a potential love interest because their text messages exposed subpar grammar is a thing that happens sometimes.
9. There are always significant differences between being a perfectionist and striving for excellence. The person who wants 100% on a math test (excellence) has a different approach & outlook than the person who wants the strands of hair being drawn in their sketch to look impeccable (perfection).
10. Being your own harshest critic to the point where you don’t embrace criticism from others — not necessarily because you can’t handle it, but because you’ve already recognized any issue long ago, and if you had the solution it’d already be handled.
11. Discovering a typo in a social media status, or even worse an email, is actually one of the absolute worst feelings and it makes you want to go into hiding for a couple weeks, months or years, depending on the severity of the mistake.
12. Taking chances is tougher than it would be for the average risk-taker because you want to make calculated leaps of faith and a guarantee on the outcome before jumping.
13. Totally understanding how the girl in this video below feels. Maybe not about butchering Whitney Houston’s classics, but you’ve experienced that level of frustration while trying (and failing) to execute something properly.
14. Even when you do something widely considered phenomenal you’re like, “Yeah, but [insert tiny detail or particular aspect here] would’ve made that even better.”
15. Being exhausted from constantly trying to please everyone and make sure everyone has the accommodations they need, if you’re capable of providing them.
16. Feeling as if you might be missing out on working with other skilled individuals because you require full control of everything. Even if multiple minds could potentially improve something, you can’t always bring yourself to collaborate and lose final say.
17. Lying in bed, wide awake as you think about how something didn’t turn out the way you’d envisioned it would. This isn’t limited to gigantic, life altering moments either — if you could’ve given a stranger better directions this morning, or something insignificant, it’s still going to be mulled over for entirely too long.
18. Pursuing something – maybe happiness or success or a bit of both – but being aware that you’ll likely never reach it because you haven’t ever felt like you’re there yet, wherever there is. 
