From Perfectionism to Brokenness

My life as a child and young adult revolved around performance. The way I understood things, my major activities -- school and piano -- each had a standard, and my job was to match that standard as closely as possible. School was never a problem -- I got straight A's from fifth grade through college -- but piano proved more challenging. With the piano, somehow no performance I gave was ever good enough. I began to concentrate less on making music and more on not making any mistakes. By the time I reached high school I had severe performance anxiety, and I changed my college major from music to history in part to avoid having to perform regularly.

My perfectionism, driven by anxiety about measuring up to an increasingly impossible standard, resurfaced with a vengeance in graduate school. I took an extension in at least one class every semester to finish the final essay, and rarely slept the last week of classes -- not because I was pulling all-nighters, but because I was lying awake at night obsessing over how much work I still had to do. By the end of my third year I'd developed a stress-related disorder. I was testing the limits of my scholastic, physical, and emotional abilities, but nothing I could produce was good enough for my inner perfectionist.

Around this time I read Henri Nouwen's Out of Solitude, a collection of three sermons that woke me up to a different way I might live my life. Instead of enslaving ourselves to worldly standards of success or usefulness, he calls us to "discover that being is more important than having, and that we are worth more than the results of our efforts." The last phrase, "We are worth more than the results of our efforts," seemed as if it had been written for me, as did Nouwen's next idea: "To the degree that we have lost our dependencies on this world . . . we can form a community of faith in which there is little to defend but much to share." Nouwen calls such a community the fellowship of the weak (or broken, a word he uses elsewhere in the book).

At that point in my life, I had stretched myself to my utmost limits. Simply being, and sharing with a community that recognized everyone's faults and failings but loved instead of judged, was something I longed for like someone might long for a drink of cool water in the desert. Nouwen's words did not point to a goal to be realized so much as a journey to be traveled, and I was ready to start.

I by no means claim that I've perfected this way of living. Just because I understand it doesn't mean that I can always live it well. But the point (to me, at least) is that perfection is illusory, something that promises more nourishment and well-being than its pursuit actually delivers. If I try to empty myself and just be, however, and to seek others who are following the same path, it doesn't matter if I stumble or fall. (To mix ice skating and educational metaphors, there are no points for style but lots of A's for effort.) My life is not perfect; it is less like a Ming vase than an old clay pitcher that has plenty of cracks and chips, and whose handle has been glued back on more than once. But the pitcher still holds water, and my life is richer and more balanced than it has ever been.