Not OK, Computer: Self-employment as a clinical perfectionist

Do as I say, not as I do.

I’m not a fan of this adage at the best of times but it transpires that for some time that’s exactly what I’ve been practicing in my work.

For months now, I’ve been adopting a lightweight approach to the practices I know will keep the new business coming in. There are two reasons:

1. I’ve been busy doing client work – in many cases helping people to do for themselves exactly what I’ve not been doing for me. Kind of like the mechanic whose car never quite gets fixed.

2. I’ve been struggling, perhaps more than I’d realized. Hand on heart, the chronic challenge I face around low self-esteem and clinical perfectionism has been getting on top of me.

The net result is that, despite the happy clients, I’ve been struggling to believe in myself for months now. It’s not stopped me from functioning outright, but I certainly don’t feel like I’ve been properly ‘in the room’ for a while now.

I’ve actually wanted to talk about it publicly for months but started and stopped writing or recording so many times, acutely aware it’s not the most positive thing to be putting out there in front of people you already/might work with.

And this isn’t one of those posts in which I’ve worked out how to break the cycle and have that experience to share. It’s from someone who is still trying to find that breakthrough at the moment. I’m sharing because I hope it’ll show someone else in a similar position that other people go through this too.

How it affects things

One of the things I notice is my increasing insularity. I retreat into myself. I can only focus on the immediate tasks and disruptions or surprises quickly become a burden rather than an opportunity.

I catastrophise. Over the silliest of things. I even lost sleep over double glazing. I go into avoidance mode: I don’t answer the phone or return calls for non-immediate stuff, but then realise weeks have passed and I’ve still not done anything about it. It’s not just responding to stuff either. I put off initiating things just as much.

Then I beat myself up for it. For feeling like it in the first place, for avoiding stuff instead of tackling it and then do it again for still not doing anything about it despite knowing this. All of this is massively amplified by knowing I work in a field that is constantly evolving and that people turn to me to advise them on this stuff. I put pressure on myself that I really don't need to.

Of course, it’s not something that exclusively affects me in work. There’s a big spill over into personal relationships too. My focus with people can becomes very narrow, in part because I realise that feeling like I’m doing stuff for and with them absolutely helps me feel involved and useful too. But I also withdraw a lot there too, finding interactions tiring and struggling to be present.

Perception vs reality

I’ve come to understand, the vast majority of this is in my head and not even close to other people’s perception of how well I perform at my job or how I interact with them. Despite this, though, I can’t begin to explain how much headspace it can take up. I’ve actually started to account for this in my work too.

My job requires me to think a lot anyway, but my natural tendency to think intensively, for extended periods of time, makes for quite a tiring combination.

So, I actively plan my capacity around it. I don’t want to be in a position now where I’ve committed 100 per cent of my working time, because there’s no scope for decompression that way.

And when I don’t have that opportunity, I feel like my brain gets full up of work stuff and there’s no space left for the important stuff – life, the reason I work.

Rounding up

Where am I going with this? I’m not sure. I just wanted to put this experience in writing to help organise my thoughts, maybe start to think differently about how I tackle it and to help someone else feel less isolated in the process.

I’m already talking to a psychotherapist – I have been for a while now – and I think we may have made a breakthrough of sorts this week.

So for anyone else that is perfectly capable, possibly even great at what they do and how they live their life, here’s the mantra I’ve been asked to keep front of mind over the coming weeks and months:

“I can do this, but I’m finding it difficult at the moment.”