On Sleeplessness

And Seeking Perfection in an Imperfect World

Starry Night Sky (1893) by Edvard Munch

For more nights than I can count, I laid in bed with my eyes shut for hours without sleeping a wink. Anyone in the room with me would have been fooled - the even breathing and shuttered eyelids would have likely been enough. But as I have unfortunately found, it’s much harder to delude one’s own body and mind - there’s no tricking myself to sleep.

As I silently paced the carpeted hallway and read pages of chapter books and ate cereal and attempted any other number of ploys to tire myself out, I thought hard about things that I now struggle to remember. One night, there was definitely concern about an AP World unit exam or two. Another night, I distinctly remember being plagued by the idea of not getting into a college that I’ve since graduated from. On other evenings, my sleeplessness was likely accompanied by a number of unwanted thoughts - mourning ended friendships, anger at myself for not being a better ballet dancer, a desire to be prettier. As I said, I can’t remember all the details now. But what I can remember from these nights is the troublesome feeling that I might not like myself as much as I thought I did - maybe not even at all. Like Joan Didion once wrote, we all come to a point where we must lie in our “notoriously uncomfortable bed].” “Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.” 

Back then, loathing oneself was weirdly en vogue, likely because most teenagers are gripping the new reality that it may be more challenging to accomplish what they want to than they previously thought. It felt like everyone was itching to share what they despised about themselves as a way to vent and form solidarity. I found myself in good company and quickly learned that there are many different ways one can handle a fledgling depletion in self-respect. My response was to the tune of hyper self-optimization - an unrelenting attempt to be perfect in just about everything I tried.

I developed a rigid obsession with my studies, my dance practice, and my appearance. No equation in my math homework was left unanswered. No night passed without an ankle exercise performed to build strength for dancing en pointe. And no day did I enter school without a full face of makeup applied. I was my own warden and I ran a tight ship, gladly prepared to berate myself should I waver off my routine. Wash, rinse, repeat.

On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be an immediate problem with this life of extreme structure. Many people struggle to develop routines that invigorate their minds and bodies - they find it challenging to be physically mobile or stretch their brains in exceptionally demanding ways. They might opt into vices with more immediate rewards instead. I was eager to live the life that successful people lived, according to my teachers and other grown-ups. I fittingly assumed that living such a life might make me successful too. And I suppose it has in one way or another.

And it also led to an obsession with punctuation marks. With worried predictions of the future and murky reflections on the past with utterances like “If only this had been different.” With a tendency to dampen ambition and play it safe, because anything otherwise would mean risking failure. And, of course, many nights, laying awake, padding around the house, wondering what exactly needs to change for me to become this person that will never exist. I was an artist obsessed with her muse, which was also herself. Somehow deeply selfish and deeply self-conscious.

I’ve often thought about and attempted to intellectualize the internal, mental agitation that grows out of self-loathing and perfectionist tendencies, specifically as it relates to one’s creative process and connection with the world around them. As an adult, I’m now often wrestling with the opposite phenomenon: the external celebration of such propensities. Compared with other distressing mental afflictions, steadfast perfectionism is often met with praise. People applaud you for maintaining a stringent fitness regimen, for never having a hair out of place - or at least making it look like you’re trying to never have a hair out of place. They laud you in front of your coworkers for working outside your designated working hours to complete a task that’s outside the scope of your designated title and pay. They see you earnestly spreading yourself thinner and thinner with a smile painted on and stick a gold star on your chest, indifferent to the sound of your gears sputtering or the smoke coming out of your ears.

The tricky truth is that many people love perfect - particularly those concerned with commercial checkpoints of success. But of course, perfect doesn’t exist, so they actually love the pursuit of perfect. If I’m just one hampster in a sea of hamsters running on their wheels, I better be the one running the fastest. Because if I’m lucky enough or fast enough, my wheel will begin spinning faster and faster, which is a good thing apparently. And even if I burn out, even if my legs give out beneath me and I fly off the wheel, sailing towards collapse, at least I was trying to be the fastest. At least I was trying to be the very best for some reason. Because maybe that means that I cared the most. Or that I cared about myself at all.

I’ve found that it’s quite possible to strive for the best, and even reach quantitative markers of it, and not care about yourself at all. Being a perfectionist often means being a lousy appraiser - assigning disproportionate value to various tasks and actions until everything feels like it carries the weight of the world. An instance of awkward socialization, a rejection from a dream job, and a slept-through alarm clock all feel like grand devastations and when everything feels like a big deal; nothing is a big deal. As such, the regard for certain accolades becomes skewed; who cares if I accomplished X if I still failed at Y? Life can go from being a series of successes to a winless battle with an unconfident commander at the helm.

The pursuit of perfection lends itself well in rooms in which efficiency and productivity are king. And there are, unfortunately, quite a few of those rooms and quite a few people telling you that being in those rooms is important. It’s challenging to feel motivated to assuage an ailment in a world in which there’s constant positive reinforcement of said ailment. One might even feel compelled to think that it’s not an ailment at all.

But rest assured, even though many will try to tell you otherwise, viewing your behaviors and actions through an overly anal lens comes with many, many snags. In tandem with the insomnia is acute alienation; experiencing intense isolation as a perfection-obsessed person in an imperfect world. People often won’t understand why you’re so dissatisfied when you already have so much - fueling a paranoia that they find you immodest and will eventually estrange themselves. A lack of relation, a lack of understanding, denying yourself human connection. Perfectionism is a knife sawing you away from others - there’s no time for people when you have your deficiencies to mull over.

I even find myself wanting to pick apart my writing about perfectionism - why complain about having motivation when so many people are without it? It can feel superfluous. But as with every other human sensation, having too much of a “good” thing is possible.

Untangling this mind mess has been the great project of my short life so far. While I’ve broken some ground here and there on new “fixes,” nothing has seemed to fully stick and maybe nothing ever will, which is a scary but important reality to accept. We can’t just push away our neurosis into deeper, quieter parts of our brain, as I’ve found places like that don’t really exist. The undesirable aberrations often find ways to leak back through, or hammer on the threshold until they’re forced to be heard. 

For now, I don’t think the answer is shunning perfectionism away but rather coaxing a different voice to reason with its more erratic counterpart. A voice that, with time and experience, learns to appraise items based on their legitimate value. One that places more and less weight where necessary so wins can be properly celebrated and losses can be properly learned from. One that lets small defeats reap small reactions and vice versa. Such a voice may eventually grow louder than the other one, and maybe some nights, even sing you to sleep.

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While writing this piece, I was really inspired by Joan Didion’s “On Self-Respect” (1961), a link to a PDF version is available here.