The Perfectionist

The Perfectionist: what combines into this pattern

You accept no flaw at all, your attention narrows to one field, and you hold an absolute standard for what counts as beautiful. It is the combination that produces an era's master craftspeople, and, at the same time, work that has to be redone without end.

The Perfectionist: where it shows up

The workspace, the tools, the output, always in order. One line of prose, one note of a performance, one pixel of a design, made and remade. At the point others call finished, the flaw is what shows first. Deep absorption comes more easily than it does to anyone else. Letting go is what is hardest.

If the alignment of the family dinner table and the outfits of the people close to you have come under inspection, that may be a sign your own standard has started being imposed on others.

Knowing when to stop is a craftsman's skill too

Psychology distinguishes perfectionism aimed at the work from perfectionism aimed at the self. The first polishes the output. The second takes every flaw as a flaw in your own worth. Separating the work's blemish from your own, and lifting your hands at good enough, these two things turn the same exactingness into either a resource or a slow depletion.

The Perfectionist: same pattern, different depth

The same pattern lived faintly and lived deeply makes for two different lives.

When it shows faintly, this is meticulous precision in balance with the rest of life. Pushed to its extreme, rework postpones completion indefinitely, and self-criticism exhausts body and mind. The path of polishing one domain for a lifetime until it resets the era's standard, and the path of being trapped in exactingness while it exhausts you and yours, fork from the same source. How strongly this pattern shows in you, and what to do about it, are part of your assessment results.