How Can I Stop Being A Perfectionist

I'll admit that I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I feel that I have to succeed the first time I try at something. I'm not very good at dealing with criticism. Nor am I adept at handling failure. This applies to all aspects of my life. Whether I'm cooking a meal for myself, baking a treat for myself, writing something, or even in gaming. In fact, I feel that everything in my day has to go right, otherwise I get upset and stay that way for the rest of the day. If I have nothing else to do during the day, and it's almost dark, I just crawl into bed. And sometimes, it carries over the next day, even after a twelve hour sleep. These days, I'm feeling bored, getting sleepy even in the early afternoon!

Several weeks ago, I tried making Meringue cookies for St. Patrick's day, tinting the batter green and flavouring it with Peppermint extract. Unfortunately, according to the recipe, it needed to bake for at least an hour. I had used up whatever egg whites I had left over from attempts at making homemade angel food cake (none of which were very successful even though I followed the recipe exactly.) I had a lot of batter left over, and after an hour of baking the first panful, the liquid residue had within the batter had begun to collect on the bottom of the bowl. Even after an hour, the cookies were still too soft and mushy, even though they were baking at the right temperature according to the recipe. I got so frustrated, I dumped the leftover batter down the sink and threw out the cookies I had baked.

Even in gaming, I am guilty of being a perfectionist. Especially in roleplaying games. When playing first person shooters, I spend a lot of time in each level trying to find all the secrets so I can have 100% completion after killing all the enemies and picking up all the items. For roleplaying games, I have a notebook full of builds for certain games, including the Fallout games, Diablo II, Titan Quest, etc. Yet whenever I play a character, I often feel that I am doing something wrong, feeling that I missed doing something earlier, gimping myself, all depending on the game I am playing. In fact, years ago when I first played Diablo II, I often deleted my character because of all this, often after the first time he or she died. In a lot of these games, your choices in skill point allocation and stat point distrubutation are permanent, and I feel that there is only one correct way to make a character. I often follow the exact same path and route through the game with every character, doing the same things, choosing the same dialogue options, etc.

I must have used up hundreds of pages of paper writing out the notes for character builds. I often try to finish both sides of a page without making any mistakes that I have to erase, leaving no marks. Even after being erased, I can still the the words I erased if I look hard enough.

In fact, this problem of mine has gotten so bad, that I can't even go very far into rpg games without feeling I need to start all over.

Does anyone else have this problem? How did you cope? How can I stop being a perfectionist?

Being a Perfectionist seems to me to be a way of redirecting behaviors that might indicate other issues. For instance, when you say

I'm not very good at dealing with criticism. Nor am I adept at handling failure. This applies to all aspects of my life.

These are issues that could point to something that can be treated in therapy. It also seems like you have issues with obsessive qualities.

Perfectionism is a symptom that acts as a euphemism for other things. I think you should give your situation a thorough going over, maybe writing it out. If it is paralyzing your ability to live a normal life, maybe therapy will do some good to organize and treat what is happening.

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