The link between perfectionism and addiction has been well documented, but I’ve come to believe that perfectionism plays an even bigger and more central role in many addictions than is generally thought – and that perfectionism itself can be addictive. Let me offer some examples of how perfectionism is handled in addiction literature, and then an idea of how I think it should be handled:
In Holy Hunger, her memoir of food addiction and healing, Margaret Bullitt-Jonas describes how she, “was a perfectionist bent on getting every detail ‘right,’ ready to pounce with condemnation on anyone – myself included – who got it ‘wrong.’”
The Key Insight
Some writers seem to have been born with an understanding of how to be productive. Here’s the super-prolific Joyce Carol Oates in her 1978 Paris Review interview:
This fits in with the idea that the writing life, and each individual piece of writing, should be a journey without a fixed destination. You can’t even set a nebulous goal, like “to sell” or “to write well” – because even a nebulous goal contradicts the very point of the exercise. (And the liberated, creative mind won’t stand for it – it will just shut down. That mind demands freedom, and balks at control.) As Flaubert said, “Success must be a consequence and never a goal.”
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