It feels right that before making more videos about creativity and mental health recovery to approach what is often an elephant in the room when we talk about creativity: perfectionism. Many people believe that they are not creative or that their creativity is not good enough. Similarly, people with lived experience of mental illness may judge themselves for what they perceive as failures in their recovery and in their lives.
As I talk about in my video, perfectionism can both add value to or impede our creative process. This is also true about perfectionism and mental health recovery.
From a young child, I was a perfectionist, especially in the realm of school achievement. I remember tearing up art that wasn’t good enough, trying over and over to create something that I felt satisfied with. I put a lot of pressure on myself and this created significant amounts of stress and anxiety.
At the same time, my desire to do better created drive and motivation. It allowed me to focus and work to improve something.
Most people with mental illness have experienced the profound repercussions of the illness on their lives – on their work, on their relationships, on their financial situations. It can devastate self-esteem. This is where self-compassion comes in.
Self-compassion modifies expectations, helps us define life based on our own values, and creates a strong inner coach who is always there for us no matter what life throws us. It is like talking to your loved ones except you are talking to yourself.
Perfectionism and self-compassion can work together. You can have high expectations and still tolerate failure. You can motivate yourself to adapt to your struggles. You can be easier on yourself when things don’t go as planned. You can invest in the things you want to do well at and let go of other things so that you don’t burn yourself out.
Art making or any creative medium is an excellent way to work with perfectionism and self-compassion. You can have an idea of what you want to create and you can work at it. When something doesn’t go as planned or it doesn’t looked like what you wanted, you can get curious instead of judging yourself. You can adapt and be open to new outcomes.
The therapeutic art piece above, a mixed media representation of an orca, I have shared before on this blog. It is a good example where I tried to create something with precision, trying to get it exactly right. But it was hard. Toward the end, I gave up trying to create the perfect shape. You can see an example of this in the tail piece. But overall, despite all the mistakes, I create something special. This piece was from a dream so it was about expressing something that held meaning for me. The process brought me very present. It helped me exceed my own expectations of what I could do in art. It brought me joy. Perfectionism joined with self-compassion created a healing experience.
Here’s a short video on perfectionism, self-compassion, and mental health recovery:
It is helpful to explore how perfectionism and self-compassion play out in your mental health recovery. I’ll give you an example about sleep. During the pandemic, due to a side effect of a medication, I started having very interrupted sleep. Stress was at an all time high and so this impacted my sleep too. I started being anxious about not being able to sleep. So I researched and found many tips and research-backed techniques to improve sleep. I had probably 10-15 things that I needed to do everyday to get the ideal sleep. Imagine trying to do 10-15 things each day for sleep when you are already managing the rest of life? I became anxious when I wasn’t able to do all these things and this impacted sleep. I also expected to sleep well every night and was grumpy and anxious when this didn’t happen. They tell you sleep is key for healing bipolar so I already felt great anxiety that lack of sleep would cause an episode.
Self-compassion had different wisdom for me: basically being as relaxed as possible by the evening so that I am yawning into my night is the most important contributor to me having good sleep (knowledge based on personal experiences not expert advice). Specifically, it is important for me to feel at peace in my heart about things in my life which often requires journaling or another form of processing each day.
Also, it helps to know that I won’t sleep well all the time (modifying expectations). It is important to give myself a lot of time in the mornings just to wake up whether from a poor night of sleep or a great one (self-compassion). Many of the rules of sleep don’t consistently work with me but the above inner wisdom is helpful.
I’ll end this post with some questions. Where do you see perfectionism operating in your life in a positive way? Where do you see it working against you? How can you keep cultivating self-compassion? How can you step outside the “shoulds” and “what other people are doing” and find a balance between drive and motivation and relaxing into life?
💚💚💚 Meegan
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