[listen]
[read, with tough love]
One thing I know for sure: when life is really fucked up and you're trying to run from your problems, having a highly demanding job is kind of the best. It's the perfect excuse to tune out the rest of the world and focus in with a lazer-like intensity on acquiring the skillset needed to make this ONE SINGLE aspect of your life absolutely perfect - making sure that the one you choose happens to be a socially acceptable marker of success, of course, so that at the end of the day your completely intentional lack of self-awareness and self-respect - not to mention your complete and total lack of basic life skills, can be re-framed as "passion."
Sit with that one for a minute. It hurts. I've been there.
As cooks, perfectionism is deeply woven into our mental framework. The kitchen is brutal and militaristic. The kitchen screams at you in fear - and if fear has become your default state of existence, the chaos of the kitchen can get crazy enough to actually drown out even the most persistently invasive mental chatter.
This sort of destructive, dismissive obsessiveness is not only revered, but expected in this excessively demanding industry.
"iF yoU cAn'T hAnDle tHe heAt, geT oUt of the kiTchEn"
You know what I hear when someone says that?
- I hear "I'm feeling shitty or stupid because I didn't know that piece of information that you just stated."
- I hear "You made a good point, but my ego won't allow me to admit that because that would mean that I am somehow wrong." [even though it wasn't a competition]
- I hear "I'm disappointed in myself because you're doing something with your life that I'd really like to do with mine and I can't seem to make it happen."
- I hear "I didn't realize how difficult this was going to be so I'm going to shame you for something completely unrelated to make myself feel a little less worthless."
- I hear "I'm not smart enough to teach you, so I'm going to try to make you feel stupid instead."
It's a cop-out. Drop it. It's gross and it makes you look immature.
There is a big difference between creatively focused high pressure - and straight up belittling like an asshole, and way too many chefs attempt to pass the latter off for the former. Losing your cool to anger is a sign of weakness. Full stop. It is an inability to manage and regulate your own emotions. This is not something to be proud of. This is something we all need to start accepting and correcting.
Extremely demanding jobs are a great place to hide your anxiety, depression, drug problems and suicidal ideation - which often stem from self worth issues and a lack of confidence in actually asking for help when needed. Anger is not a virtue, nor is it something that should command respect. How are young cooks supposed to ask for clarification or help when they know it's going to result in public humiliation?
Side note - Why does every "joke" in the industry revolve around humiliating each other? It's sad, really. Kitchens are filled with so many formerly-bullied children acting like bullies themselves. End the cycle. Be better.
Projection
So many of us are masking a lot of deep, internalized shame. Most of us have had some really fucked up things happen in our past - kitchens are a veritable haven for those of us who have met the devil and lived. We probably don't exactly have the greatest family role models to draw from - if we even speak to our families at all. We've all made some poor choices in the past. Fundamentally, we cannot tolerate our own mediocrity - so we take it out on our coworkers or employees.
In psychological terms, this is referred to as "projection." We feel shame when we are not perfect - and shame actually physically hurts. Somatically, shame is painful and sharp in the chest, it burns in the face, and feels incredibly heavy and uncomfortable in the upper body. It casts a weird dissociative fog over our vision and causes us to freeze. It sucks. A lot. We try to deal with this shame in one of two ways: we either internalize it, pushing it deeply into our "oh shit I don't know how to deal with this" box buried in the back of our minds - or we externalize it like a hot potato, throwing it back at the person who "made" us feel that way in the form of anger or at someone we perceive as weaker (or somehow "lesser") as an unprompted insult or ad hominem attack.
Projection occurs when we attribute an element of our repressed personality, which resides in our unconscious mind, to another person or group. We can project both negative and positive characteristics, however, there is a greater tendency to project the former rather than the latter.
The Shadow
Swiss psychologist and philosopher Carl Jung describes this phenomena as our "shadow". Our shadow is the unconscious naughty part of ourselves. The shadow is our bad side. The shadow is the Ego's ex-Mafia bodyguard - and chances are, it's probably running your life right now. Modern culture avoids the shadow at all costs - repressing, suppressing, denying, and avoiding the undesirable traits that make us uniquely human,
"If and when 'an individual makes an attempt to see his shadow, he becomes aware of (and often ashamed of) those qualities and impulses he denies in himself but can plainly see in others—such things as egotism, mental laziness, and sloppiness; unreal fantasies, schemes, and plots; carelessness and cowardice; inordinate love of money and possessions— it is a painful and lengthy work of self-education".
At it its core, perfectionism is about perfecting the self. Perfectionists are deeply insecure and stuck in a repetitive cycle of self-defeat. Does this resonate? Do you never know what to do, yet somehow you know it's always going to end up wrong?
We don't talk about this, and we really should.
Are you familiar with the myth of Sisyphus?
Sisyphus was the Greek king of Corinth. To paraphrase, he tried to cheat death and Hades doomed him to roll a boulder uphill for all eternity as punishment. Every time he would get the boulder to the top of the mountain, it would roll back down again and he would have to start all over at the bottom. I can't help but see glaring similarities in the professional kitchen.
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor." - Albert Camus
Escaping the perfectionist trap
“Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order.” ― Anne Wilson Schaef
Perfectionism is an illusion — we believe it makes us better, but it actually harms us. It keeps us trapped in a perpetual cycle of not being good enough, exacerbating anxiety and intensifying disappointment while decreasing personal satisfaction. Perfection doesn't make you feel perfect - it makes you feel inadequate.
According to professor + lecturer Brené Brown, perfectionism is not the same thing as striving to be your best. Perfection is not about healthy achievement and growth. Perfectionism is used by people as a shield to protect themselves against the pain of being vulnerable — they don’t want to be blamed or judged by others.
Perfectionists are always worried about what people think about them. Perfectionists always think that everyone is judging every note of their performance. Perfectionists see themselves as worthless if they cannot attain the same level of "success" as their peers - but often, these self-imposed expectations are completely unrealistic. Often we aren't aware of the struggles of those who have succeeded. Often we have simply under-budgeted for difficulty and may just need to reconsider our approach. Often, our perspective becomes unbalanced and we need to take a day off and sit in nature and NOT think about work for a few hours.
Growing up, we learned that making mistakes feels uncomfortable at best, and humiliating at worst. Maybe a parent or teacher criticized us or made us feel wrong, or maybe we were bullied for being a little bit different as kids, and we swore we would never let anyone make us feel that awful again - so we translated that experience into a painful memory and filed it away under "H" - for "humiliation" and a "hard lesson learned". To avoid revisiting that pain, we strive to be perfect as adults. Many of us are still driven by the desire to avoid criticism - so we hide behind our perfectionist masks and get angry at ourselves instead of allowing others to criticize us. Eventually, we forget that it's just a mask and not our real selves - and perfectionism becomes a permanent part of us.
Many people are quite proud of their perfectionist part - after all, it's what maintains your unreasonably high standards! On one level, this is true - but what most don't understand is that your perfectionist part needs you to mess up so that it can improve you (and help you become even more perfect!).
The Perfectionist is the very part of you that will make you screw up so that it doesn't lose its job.
The Perfectionist isn't you - it's your conditioning.
Let's call this part Karen instead.
Karen is in charge of all that negative self-talk, telling you that you're letting yourself or others down if things aren't perfect.
Karen is the part of you that insists that you must always be polite - then makes you lash out or be uncharacteristically rude to someone behind closed doors.
Karen is the part that calls you fat - then makes sure you cheat on your diet so she can give you a hard time about it (in order to not lose her job!).
Karen is the part of you that longs for love and connection - then picks a fight with every good person that walks into your life until you push them away, just so she can tell you you never deserved them anyway.
Your perfectionist part needs to make sure that you keep doing the things it can berate you for to keep you in your comfort zone and prevent real change from happening.
It is truly a never-ending loop of hypocrisy - the pressure to appear flawless is driven by the fear of failure, but also by our desire to be loved and admired.
Whether it's cooking, working out, eating healthy, or being a compassionate, functional adult - we all have to suck at something before we ever get good at it. It is always better to do something rather than nothing - perfectionism often keeps us firmly locked into inaction, because chronic overthinking tends to paralyze decision-making. Learn to celebrate the joys of imperfection. Imperfect action always trumps perfection, because perfection doesn't exist.
Setting high personal standards and working hard toward them is a good thing. However, there’s a dark side to always aiming high - perfectionism often turns into an unhealthy, toxic habit.
Perfection leaves no room for actual, lasting improvement - if you have nothing to improve, why bother showing up at all?
Often, perfectionists forget that they have one big thing: choice.
It is a choice to work 90 hours a week at a job you hate.
It is a choice to obsess over an ex partner.
It is a choice to hold on to anger or resentment.
It is a choice to stay safely in your comfort zone.
It is always a choice - even when it seems like it isn't.
Let's face it - making mistakes sucks, and it sucks even more when others see you make them. If you're not used to making mistakes, it's going to be really weird and uncomfortable at first - which is why we should actively practice making mistakes. Be playful and challenge yourself to look for the humor in the situation as if you were an outside observer - try to exaggerate the circumstances until you desensitize yourself and the initial discomfort wears off. Try to really own the discomfort - often, saying something like "Wow, this is super awkward for me, I've never been in a position like this!" will actually make people like and respect you more. Try to be authentic about how you're feeling and what you're experiencing. With practice, you will replace any awkwardness associated with "messing up" with matter-of-factness.
Stop focusing on the end result - instead, try to make every step as enjoyable as possible. Trying is the fun part. Learning is what makes life worth living.
Failure is not weakness.
Be great, not perfect.
[absorb]
Author's note:
This is not a platitude or an attempt at a character assault. This is an actual cognitive journey that I took, shared in the hopes of reaching anyone who might be stuck on a similar path. I'm not pretending to know all the answers - I only write about what I have experienced to be true. This perspective might help you; it might not. If it doesn't, I sincerely hope you find the answers that you're looking for somewhere else. I understand if this was painful to read.
Meeting my shadow fucked my life up for months before I was able to make sense of any of it, let alone put myself back together again. It's an incredibly difficult process of personal transformation, but it's not nearly as difficult as carrying the weight of shame or falsity for the rest of your life. To date, it has been the most rewarding thing that I have ever done.
[awareness check]
Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Really tune in to your body - scan it from toe to head, pausing to notice any sensations you might be feeling. Where do you hold tension in your body? What feels tight? What feels like pain? When did you first notice the feeling? What's the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about this?
Stand up (or walk a few steps - just move from where you are). Drink a glass of water. Stretch.
[integrate]
still thinking? try this on.
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