Working at Perfekt

For the last few days, I’ve been working on Step 4, which cleverly leads to Step 5.

• Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves
• Admit to God (there HE is again), ourselves, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

No big deal, right?

Yeah.  I’ve been dreading these buggers since I first saw them, sniveling and cowering down the page from the quite helpful and good-feeling-generating Steps 1-3.  If there’s anything I am most assuredly NOT good at, it’s looking honestly at myself, with no filters in place, finding some of that dark stuff that doesn’t generate the good feelings, and then…admitting to HP (that’s “Higher Power.”  Or Harry Potter, depending on the day), myself (who?) and…gulp…another human being when I’ve made a teensy error in judgment.

The workbook I have gave a template of sorts that could be used to make a chart for the moral inventory, along with some pre-printed behaviors, actions, thoughts, etc. that might spark some searching and fearless…searching, I suppose.  And if there’s anything I love, it’s making charts and using my favorite pen to fill them in.  So far so good.  Then, I started getting into the meat of the thing.  If taken seriously, looking at oneself with this kind of scrutiny feels uncomfortable at best, horrifying at worst.

Now, I’m afraid that I’m not quite transparent enough to list all my foibles here for general consumption.  Let’s just say that I’m facing up to some things about myself and my behaviors that range from embarrassing to gut-wrenching in intensity.  I’m way too dependent on others for establishing my value as a human being.  I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of the victim/martyr complex – I’ve mentioned that here before.  That one’s tricky, because, yeah…autism happened and it sucks.  But I digress.  I have way too many crazy kinds of “beliefs” about myself that don’t really bear up under factual examination – but the thing about beliefs is that sometimes you have some that don’t make any sense at all, and yet…you still act on them as if they’re law.  I’m finding it’s okay to question them. 

I could go on, but I’ll spare all of us from my laundry list of crap.  Part of the process of the inventory is not only to enumerate these things, but also to look for ways they manifest in your life, and to assign a number symbolizing the level of pain that particular thing has caused.  In looking over my list, I can see why I’ve often felt burdened, weighed down, and worthless.  My scores are off the charts.  Of course.

Which brings me to step 5.  In my own way, I’ve been confessing this stuff to HP, to David, to friends, to therapists – anyone willing to listen (and some who were clearly cornered and couldn’t get away) – for years.  I’ve beaten myself up, sworn to change, blah blah blah…and then settled right back in.  Sure, there ARE some really and truly painful things I’ve done, some that took years to work their way to the surface – but in my heart I believe I have admitted those to the relevant parties and also to my mental health professional.  I think I’m covered in the “admittance of wrongs” department for the most part.  The larger point here, for me, is that I have often tried to hide my wrongs from myself, somehow perpetuating the very notion that I am still working on being perfect.  How does a person live for nearly 39 years and still think that’s POSSIBLE, even in the remotest stretches of the mind?

Denial is a powerful thing, and I have ridden that wave as far as it’ll go.  I’m so very imperfect.  I’m broken and backwards and mixed up – but SO IS EVERYONE ELSE.  Even those people who seem to have it all, don’t.  Oh, they may have stuff I don’t, but then I have stuff they don’t.  It takes all kinds, right?  The great irony here is that people like me who have persisted in gazing longingly at the model of perfection mess up 84% more than people who just LIVE.

(I made up that statistic.  I did read somewhere that perfectionists actually make MORE mistakes, but I can’t remember where.)

It’s funny.  I originally named this post “Step OFF” (homage to Seinfeld there) because I was kind of frustrated with these steps.  As I’ve written these words, though, I’m seeing things a bit differently.  It’s good to “come clean” to myself, and to recognize the futile nature of trying to attain perfection.  That realization, along with the tools of steps 1-3, help me to feel as if the escalator has moved ever so slightly in an upward direction.  So, I changed the title – credit to Geddy Lee for this one.

Working at perfekt

Got me down on my knees

Success to failure

Just a matter of degrees

*Note: thanks and admiration to my dear friend Jim, who made my snazzy new blog header. You, sir, ROCK. Thank you.