The Perfectionist Treadmill and the Validation Crab Bucket
Perfectionism is a treadmill: it takes a lot of energy, it gets you nowhere while you’re on it, and while it can be healthy to engage in for a limited spurt of time, you’ve got to step off of it after a little while.
We know what a trap perfectionism can be. It can make us hate our flawed, human selves. It can make us vicious toward others. No one hates fat people more than the newly-thin; no one hates poor people more than the self-made man. Scam artists use the promise of relentless self-improvement (lose weight! get rich! boost your immune system! become irresistible to women!) to sell snake oil and reactionary philosophies.
Perfectionism can paralyze. Perfect is the enemy of good, as the saying goes. When our reasonable, decent efforts fail to make us perfect, sometimes we give up. We stop writing that story because it’s not coming out as perfect as the unwritten story in our head was. We stop going to the gym because it didn’t give us a perfect body.
Years ago, I made the mistake of telling a friend that I’d purchased a stationary bike and had gotten into using it a few times a week. I was very proud of myself. Instead of encouragement or praise, the friend scolded my inadequacies: a bike isn’t good enough! It doesn’t exercise your arms! You’re not getting a full body workout! Instead of motivating me to push myself more, this just made me want to give up and play video games instead of doing all that cardio, because why bother if my decent effort wasn’t good enough?
Exhausted by the death march of perfectionism, we turn to spaces where we can accept ourselves the way we are and connect with other people and commiserate and validate each other. These spaces can be a safe haven from a society that relentlessly tells you you’re inadequate.
They can also be a trap.
Incel communities started as a place for lonely people to commiserate and vent—and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But instead of offering each other healthy emotional support, these spaces devolved into brain-melting misogynist swamps where sexually frustrated men make themselves even more unfuckable by filling each other with hate. When a member of this community manages to get his act together and enter a relationship, the other incels aren’t happy for him; instead, they react with fury and accuse him of betraying the group.
Most groups aren’t as dramatically poisonous as incel forums, but often vent communities end up reinforcing defeatist attitudes that keep people stuck in a rut that’s making them miserable. You reject Bootstrap mentality so hard you end up descending into learned helplessness. I’ve been in mental health communities where members mocked each other for trying to make positive lifestyle changes, like getting out of the house and sleeping better. I’ve been in body positive spaces where I was accused of fatphobia for going to the gym a couple times a week.
This can happen on an individual level, too. I’ve known people in relationships—romantic, professional, platonic—where the supposedly accepting, loving partner was actively sabotaging the other person’s attempts to improve themselves. That coworker who aggressively pushes cake on you when you’re trying to eat healthier. The tyrannical mother who gets angry when her son starts dating a girl who loves and respects him. The friend who keeps inviting a recently-sober buddy out for cocktails. What can seem supportive and affectionate is secretly a trap. They need you to need them—and if you become happier, healthier and more confident, you won’t need them as much.
Unfortunately, this happens in all too many writing communities. If you’re just writing for a fun hobby, then do whatever you want, enjoy yourself. But if you’re writing to become a professional author, then you absolutely must get serious about improving your craft. It means challenging yourself. It means healthy self-criticism. It also means exposing yourself to a wider range of creative influences, like reading difficult books for grown-ups.
But so, so, so many writing groups will try to keep you from escaping the crab bucket. There’s a massive social media ecosystem of wannabe/self-published writers who scream accusations of ableism in response to standard, sensible advice like “writers should write regularly” or “writers should read a lot.” Fanfic communities, I am told, react with indifference or even fury when popular fan writers try to take it to the next level by creating original fiction that doesn’t strictly adhere to formulaic AO3 tags. Fanwriters are valid. Middle aged white women who only read YA romance are valid. Self-proclaimed authors who have never finished (or even started) a writing project are valid. You don’t want to invalidate them by doing better, do you?
Maybe these people just have bad taste. Maybe they’re envious of your talent. Or maybe they’re afraid that if you become successful and confident, you’ll leave them for something better. And maybe they’re right. Not because you’re a disloyal snob. But because you are too good for a bunch of insecure, manipulative creeps who want to stop you from reaching your full potential.
(Header image via Elpipster)
