As an autistic ADHDer, I’ve found that certain words have a glow around them from the moment I learn them. Words like sarcastic, euphemism, and even compliment appear as magical keys to unlocking the secret underworld of communication, and I can recall from whom I received each of these keys (my mother, my uncle, and my mother again, respectively). Then there are words with a dark aura around them. These are not the keys, but the doors. Given their shadowy nature, it’s difficult to tell whether these doors are meant to offer me passage or to keep me trapped.
I have a hazy memory of when when I first heard the word perfectionist. I was sitting in the guidance counselor’s office explaining the immense difficulty I was having keeping up with the high standards of my relatively demanding Christian high school. Even though my grades were good, I was clearly feeling guilty that I wasn’t doing more to perfect every task before me, feeling worried that I couldn’t work as hard as I was much longer, and feeling generally exhausted. She empathetically responded, “Yeah, I’m a perfectionist too, and it can be hard for us perfectionists to….” The memory kind of fades out there. I have a sense of the tone of the rest of the conversation, but not the words. She carried on trying to be kind and constructive, using her experience of struggling with perfectionism to help advise me as best she could, while I was kind of zoned out, grappling the implications of this new label that had been applied to me as casually as if I had been wearing it on a nametag. All I had expressed was that I was trying to make sure I did the right thing, and if that made me a “perfectionist”, who wasn’t?
I was still grappling with the same darned word a few months ago when I made my return to filmmaking and to puppetry after a five-year hiatus for the 48 Hr. Halloween Puppet Film Project. The point of this recurring event is to give filmmakers the motivation to collaborate on a puppet film by offering a fun project that, given its tight time crunch, doesn’t come with especially high expectations for the finished product. If it doesn’t come out the way they planned, who can complain? They only had 48 hours to write, shoot, and edit the whole film! Perhaps that’s what I needed to feel comfortable getting back into a medium as difficult as filmmaking, but more than that, I was lured back into puppetry by the chance to work with my frustratingly talented friend Richard Gomez. Anyone reading this is likely already familiar with his work as an artist and puppet builder, so it should go without saying why I was excited to finally work with him on a puppet film.
I arrived at Richard’s apartment a little late with a trunk full of whatever filming equipment I could find, but not nearly enough, and not the right stuff. I’d been so busy that I didn’t have time to even begin to figure out how I would rent boom mics and lighting panels, so I’d grabbed whatever microphones and lamps I had around and decided we would make do. Around 9:00 PM, the festival organizer announced the film’s required object, theme, and action (“nut”, “midnight movie”, and “observe”, respectively), and the brainstorming session began. My hope was to have the script done that night so we could start shooting right away in the morning, but by the time we turned in for the night, we still hadn’t agreed on a story, and it was mostly due to my own discontent.
Between bites of IHOP eggs and hash browns that I’d hoped would help me recover from my bad night’s “sleep” on my air mattress, I laid out a story I thought would work that featured a bunch of Richard’s ideas, and Richard agreed to move forward with it. While most other participants in the festival were shooting that morning with puppets they had already built, I was still writing a script and Richard was building a super professional squirrel puppet. It became clear that we would have to finish the film without a shot list, which is a little like starting a road trip and learning halfway through that you’ll have to finish it without the GPS. Then it became apparent that we had no monitor setup, and when I tried to improvise one using my laptop, the internet router stopped working and never started again, leaving us largely offline and without monitors for the shoot. Fortunately, the camera had a small screen that could be aimed at me as I puppeteered, so we were kind of able to make do… but the puppetry was rough. That’s just not how it’s supposed to be done.
In the middle of the day, we had to run out for errands, but that afternoon, we moved quickly. I puppeteered as many of the characters as I could so Richard could keep building all day, since he was also building props. I’d finish with one prop or character, and then Richard would take it and reuse the parts to make the next one for the next shot. Gav improvised and recorded an original score on the Theremin, and Richard wrote and recorded an original song on his ukulele. I played the two lead characters using the same squirrel puppet redressed between scenes as there was not enough time or material to build a second one. There was also no time to play recordings of my previous takes as the other characters to know when to speak, so it was all guesswork that I hoped I could fix in post. We all kept each other on track until all the footage was moved to my laptop, and then we cleaned up and ate pizza as Gav showed us his film projector. I drove through a storm from their suburb of Philadelphia to my suburb of Baltimore that night, and began editing the next morning. Richard was traveling to New York Comic Con, illustrating the backgrounds for the green screen scenes while riding the train and sending me his work from the convention floor. I kept editing all day until the final hour and submitted the “finished” film fourteen minutes before it was due.
Of course, it was hardly finished. I’d spent the morning telling myself, “I don’t need any of this to be good right now because it’s just the assembly cut, and I’ll have the afternoon to polish it.” Ha. The assembling took far longer than I predicted, as did the ADR – the source audio from the shoot turned out to be mostly unusable, so I had to re-record all the lines in post. There would be no going back for punch ups and polish. Dinner would be served raw.
I often forget that I have been diagnosed with a slow processing disorder. Twice. I forget that my brain is working at entirely different speeds at the same time that get out of sync with one another. If I take my time with a task, I take too long and get forgetful. If I try to hurry a task, I still take a long time, but in a more jittery way. I was rushing through that editing process all day, but there was no way it was going to work out well even with all the buffers I left for myself in case I needed more time. I have been rushing through typing this article today, and it has taken me hours. Getting from here to the end of it will take me a few more hours, even though I meant to publish it half an hour ago. I am typing quickly in these moments when common writer’s block hasn’t thwarted me, but even when I know what I want to type, my words are getting lost and jumbled somewhere in the central nervous system, and I have to stop and try to collect them. At the moment, I have several sentences I would like to type at the same time, and I’m struggling to figure out how to order them in a sequence with connective tissue that would make sense to a reader.
I guess the next step in writing this article is probably to share the film:
Gee, look at that! The film was about perfectionism! Perhaps there really is a point to this article somewhere!
The story was inspired by “Buridan’s Ass”, the philosophical dilemma illustrated by a hungry donkey who is equidistant between two equally necessary sources of nourishment (sometimes presented as water and a hay bale, other times as two hay bales). Having no preference and no reason to choose one over the other, it starves to death. I think the direction in which I took this story was a little bit different from the way that hypothetical is meant to be used, but it’s the image that kept coming to mind as I was stuck in indecision in the writing process. The tight timeframe for the festival may have taken the pressure off for those who were capable of settling on decisions they could live with in the allotted time, but for some of us, making such decisions quickly is not simply a matter of learning to compromise and, as they say, kill your darlings. Those are terribly difficult on their own, but managing a brain that doesn’t do anything I want it to do or need it to do in any reasonable amount of time (but won’t do hardly anything I want without a time limit for it to fail to meet) makes experiences like this miserable.
In times like this, I think back on what my life was like in high school when I first learned the word perfectionist, and I wonder, was that word ever right for me? I don’t think that was a fair assessment. I had to work extra hard because, if I didn’t, I could never know what my brain was going to do. As an ADHDer, my memory wasn’t good for much of anything besides my interests. As someone with a slower brain (or, at least, a partially slow brain) I had to spend extra time on my homework and hurry through tests and writing assignments. For both of those reasons, timeliness became hugely important to me, so I was looking at my watch every moment I had the chance, arriving at school extra early, and speed-walking down hallways between every class. If not for my inner drill sergeant, and the anxiety that kept me afraid of said inner drill sergeant, the rest of my nature would have pulled me toward tardiness, and its force should not be underestimated.
Now that I’m out of high school, I’m able to manage my schedule a little differently, and there are no punishments for being a little late for most events on my calendar, so I’m sometimes late and sometimes not, and I usually I don’t have to stress over it much. Still, the feeling of a lack of agency in those times when I’m late hurts a heck of a lot. As an ADHDer, there is a vast disparity between what I want to do and what I want to do. One of those “wants” is what I feel compelled to do, and the other “want” is what I wish I would do. Often, neither of those is what I feel up to doing, and I have to repeatedly ask myself how much is an appropriate amount to push myself.
The other side of this – the more important side, which is what I meant for this article to be about – is how the notion of perfectionism masks autistic struggles. In high school, I tried to do everything right because I didn’t know what else to do. I assumed that, if I was being asked to complete several assignments on time, study for several tests, keep up with extracurriculars, and arrive to class on time, then it must have been possible for students to do it all. In truth, everyone cuts corners, and I had developed my little ways of cutting them, where I could find them, but it was not clear which corners one was expected to cut and which one should never cut. Clearer direction would have helped to a point, but school faculty and parents don’t particularly want to admit that students have to cut a corner somewhere or decide which corner. You see, while you’re not expected to try to do everything right, you are expected to try to do each thing right. This is a logical paradox that is best overcome by all those allistic instincts and intuitions that I did not have. The only places where I cut corners were where I ran out of time or motivation, which still happened often enough that it hurt my grades at times.
It’s frustrating having an understanding of how the rules that were meant for neurotypical people were clearly not meant for me. School faculty tends to apply a great deal of pressure to whole classes and student bodies to try to get students to care enough to try their best, within reason. For those of us who didn’t need much in the way of scare tactics to be invested in doing our best, this was all overkill, and it produced great anxiety in me that it would not have in someone with more typical motivational thresholds. To the extent to which I was a perfectionist, it was because I was a literalist, and that was because I was autistic. If I was told a rule was important, I was inclined to believe it and take it seriously. Given that so many of the rules were difficult for me to follow, putting pressure on myself to adhere to my values seemed especially important since a comfortable amount of effort on my part would have appeared to the teachers as utter carelessness, which would have misrepresented my personality.
Another autistic factor is the need to connect with adults. For most of my life, I have had an easier time talking with people who are older than me than with people my own age or younger. Most of my friendships from college that have meant the most to me in life are the ones I’ve had with professors. In high school, the need to be able to get along with the adults in a friendly way, compounded with the need to get them on my side when I have a disability-related issue, made it vital that I have an identity that was different from the other students, characterized by being an easy student to have who was clearly invested in the work. I did not have the social skills to be a teacher’s pet, but at least I was clearly too innocent to be a teacher’s adversary.
Also at play is the autistic desire for there to be a “perfect” option in the first place, or at least a “right” or “correct” option. If there’s a difference between “perfect” and “correct”, I still couldn’t tell you what it is. Maybe the neurotypicals know, but I don’t. I recognize that life cannot be boiled down to the correct and the incorrect, but part of me will always long for it. It’s the romantic in me. What makes this so painful is that the world around me tries to tempt me with the promise that, with good enough character and enough education and reasoning, I can learn what makes some decisions objectively good and some objectively bad, regardless of their relationship to morality. I’d like to think I know better now, but seeing how those with certain social intuitions get to navigate a world that pretends this is true fairly comfortably still hurts.
There is a worse pain still. In my artistic endeavors, I want my work to be just “right” so it can express what I’m feeling inside. When I can’t do this – when I try to express myself and I fail – the experience is all kinds of bad.
Hi. It’s been about nine months since I wrote everything you just read above.
I put so, so many hours into it, and it took so, so much energy, but I was never able to finish it. I was not trying to make it perfect. I wasn’t even trying to make it great. I was just trying to quickly type up what I was thinking and feeling, and that proved to be such a challenging task that I largely abandoned this blog after only a few attempts at posting.
The point, I suppose, is that most every task is very hard for me to do. When people see how much thought and effort I put into things, they think it’s overkill, but it’s really just that I’m a disabled man who has to put a lot more effort into things to find a path forward that’s actually an option for me. And it takes me a lot longer to walk that path.
In the year since I made that short film, I have had increasing regrets about it. The number one regret, I think, is how I gave into the allistic folks’ framework for their experience that has been wrongly mapped onto mine. I am not a perfectionist. I’m just trying to be myself in a brain and body that make it very hard for me to do anything that really expresses who I am. I just want my experience of disability to be understood and accepted as such. Is that so wrong?
It is not perfectionism that is my enemy. It is the popularity of the word itself, and the general cultural attitude around it, that is my enemy. Maybe it’s the right word for somebody though. If that’s you, I hope it has helped you.
Join the conversation in the comments below if you teared up at the end of Neil Gabler’s Walt Disney biography when it says Walt attained perfection!
by J.D. Hansel
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