‘There’s No Such Thing as a Happy Perfectionist’

“There’s no such thing as a happy perfectionist” – Robert J. Estlund

There are three main laws of thermodynamics, in layman’s terms:

1. Energy can not be created nor destroyed; all energy that ever was, still is.

2. For spontaneous process, the entropy of the universe must increase.

3. A perfect crystal must have zero entropy.

For those of you in the room, like me, that barely passed physics, entropy essentially means chaos.  In scientific terms, chaos is used to describe anything other than a perfect alignment of all parts. In other words; perfection.   

A spontaneous process is any change that happens naturally, without outside influence.  Gravity, burning wood, breathing; all examples of spontaneous processes; none of which we could live without. 

A naturally occurring, perfect crystal does not exist. Perfection does not exist. It physically isn’t a thing. If it did, we wouldn’t be able to breath.

This year, my grandmother died, my husband almost did- multiple times, and my 9-year-old became a perfectionist that also started discussing philosophical theories surrounding the afterlife and creation of the universe.

My life is never dull.

One of the theories he’s considering is that of the Mayan calendar: We’re all dead and everything that’s happened since December 21, 2012 has really been a dream that we’ve had as we were dying and that these last 10 years hasn’t really been more than a few minutes as we slip away.  It just feels like a decade. In this theory, his sister, who was born in 2016, doesn’t really exist, which he considers not only plausible, but a bonus. All the more reason to believe. 

The concept of mortality and purpose has become a resounding theme for me. Debates of societal norms and expectations vs. ‘we have one life – fuck society and it’s ideals’ was a silent debate I often had with myself.  As I watched what happens when one’s energy changes from vibrant to struggling on a daily basis and listened to my grandmother tell me stories of her past and explain her fears of the unknown afterlife, I struggled with wondering what the point of it all is.  Is it accomplishment? Happiness? Legacy? To raise more and better humans to aid in the continuation of the species?  Is it pure enjoyment?  Maybe the ‘YOLO’ trend had some merit. Hell, maybe the Mayans (and Sawyer) were right and we’re all already dead and living in this alternative universe between dead and alive and therefore there is no point because none of this is real.  I haven’t decided yet.

My grandmother was a force.  She defied a lot of odds in her 94 years of life and carried with her a big personality that had no patience for downtime. She was a God-fearing survivor with a lot of insecurities, but she was never shy. She drove like she had a death wish, she cooked as if a whole village might show up at her doorstep and she kept house as if the Queen was never more than a block away. She motivated others with a side of guilt, she was always up for a cocktail (or 3) and for the first 20 years of my life, every time I got a haircut, she told me I looked like a movie star. She loved Bingo, scratch offs and never failed to flirt with a good-looking man, even at 94…she tried to set my sister up with the doctor in the hospital the day she died.  She was the life of the party; full of energy and spunk and she smiled with her eyes in a way that made you feel like you were in on a secret. She was also particular.  There was a right and a wrong way to do things, and I learned in the last few years that she had some regrets, most of which seemed to surround her perfectionism that sometimes prevented her from acting on her empathy.  Empathy disrupts things, denial is easier. If things can simply continue as planned, we can say it’s OK, and If we say it’s OK, it must be.  Like I said, she was a survivor, and this is one of many reasons why. But in the end, she was afraid she wasn’t good enough on earth to save her soul and go straight to heaven. She was afraid of the unknown and the lack of control. –‘It might be wonderful, but what if it isn’t?’  Because of that fear, she hung on longer than she probably wanted to.  I thought she was going to live forever.  She always told me she would, and I think part of me believed her. I haven’t really grieved much since she died, and I don’t know if it’s because I grieved when she moved into the nursing home and life for her as I knew it would never be the same, or if it’s because I knew she was ready to be done living like she was, and therefore it made it easier to accept. Maybe I just haven’t had the time to grasp that she’s gone because I would go stretches without seeing her when life got busy. Maybe I’m just in a bit of denial and haven’t had the opportunity to process everything that’s happened in the last few months.  Or maybe I just know she’s not really gone – she’s just changed. After all, all energy that ever was, still is and she was a force. Wild with energy. But I do miss her smile.  I think about it often.

I have fewer answers, fewer conclusions as I have in my past blogs. I think this year hit different.  Everything I knew life to be stopped being. Everything I planned life to become, took a turn down an unfamiliar path I can’t come back from. Several pillars of familiarity and stability I had, seemed to disappear, and I very much felt dropped in the middle of an unknown country, navigating my way through a busy city where I don’t speak the language. It’s one thing to find your way out when you know where you’re trying to go.  Eventually finding your way home is an option. People will help you learn the language or offer a map with pictorial directions to get you back the way you came.  But when you don’t know how you got here and you don’t know where you’re going, even if you do learn the language, no one can help you navigate your way to ‘nowhere’. 

I hung on to any control I had left with a death grip. I made every attempt to control the chaos as life changed and put the pieces back in place, seeking them out and lining them up. Trying to make all the new shapes and sizes fit.  I mean this both figuratively and literally.  By July I had assigned spots for all items in my refrigerator and if something was purchased that wasn’t part of the original plan, I was annoyed.  Well, mad. Annoyed doesn’t accurately describe that particular tantrum. 

But the chaos continues to take over because that’s how change occurs. I’ve found myself with no choice but to aqueous to spontaneous process, for I’ve learned to pick my battles and I will not win a war against physics. I live 12 hours at a time. I don’t let myself cry for more than 60 seconds.  I make few commitments in advance, and I no longer spend time justifying my responses or reasonings to others, as that is a waste of energy in an effort to align myself to be viewed in someone else’s cloudy crystal. I’ve learned that energy alters, it moves… it does not disappear. I got a D in physics, so apparently the universe felt I needed to learn this the hard way. So, as the landscapes change and the roads take unfamiliar turns and the familiar become memories, I no longer ask how to get home.  Instead, I ask for how to get to the next safe spot to rest, because moving energy is constant and exhausting. Until I have an idea of where I am going, there are no other directions to give.  So, when I find myself thirsty and stranded in a desert when I was ocean side 12 hours before, I simply ask for the closest watering hole and then I rest, drink and asses the current situation.  I do my best to let go in the areas I am able and see where the chaos takes me. For, if I continue to force an alignment of parts and pieces that are no longer what they were, I will suffocate myself and those around me.  Striving for control is nothing more than planning for perfect, and a wise man once told me: ‘There’s no such thing as a happy perfectionist’. A perfect crystal cannot exist. 

During the last 4 years of my grandma’s life, I spent more time with her one-on-one than I did the previous 35, and I could regret not spending more time with her prior, but instead I find myself grateful that those 4 years happened when they did, because I didn’t take them for granted. I asked questions, I heard stories, she told me how she felt about things, and what I took away from all of that was that she truly loved life and people and her passionate nature allowed her to control the energy around her.  She watched her mother die as a child and 80 years later, I could still see the pain in her eyes when she told me what happened and how they carried on after.  In turn, I saw her eyes light up when she told me the story of how she met my grandfather working in a factory and I saw her eyes smile and wink when she told me how she blackmailed her dad in to giving her a quarter every Sunday to not tell her mom when he went to the bar instead of to church.  Her only real regret seemed to be not stopping to take stock in the situations around her and adjust accordingly.  She wished she could have had a better bedside manner when my grandpa was sick, and that she had grasped the severity of my aunt’s cancer and flown down to be with her during treatments.  She said she spent more time trying to keep things as they were to keep from worrying and since she had never experienced illness in those ways personally, it was easy enough to deny their hardship. She thought she had been self-involved and lacked empathy in hindsight.  But I knew her better than that. She wasn’t self-involved and didn’t lack empathy, she unknowingly survived on anxiety. She loved life and feared change, so striving for planned and perfect kept the unknown at bay. 94 years later, this was her only true regret.  I hope at 94, I will have lived a life I can recount with the same heart-felt detail, have just as few regrets and smile in a way my children will think about when I’m gone. 

Sawyer,

This year you got mad. You had waited patiently last year for Murphy to take his law and move on, but he seemed to stick around and you finally had enough of his shit.  You’ve always been a dreamer as well as a creative with a logical approach and nothing about this last year made sense to you.  You hung on tight to ideas and ideals and you pushed back hard…holding me accountable for every upset that came your way.  There were days I didn’t recognize you and it broke my heart.  As you get older, it’s become apparent that you’re perceptive on a deep level and your tolerance for bullshit (and most people) is slim.  You spend your time thinking about the bigger things in life, like the black hole, the size of the universe, creation and spirituality. You’ve asked questions this year looking more for opinion than factual answers, like what I think happens when one dies and how the earth came to be, and if God really did create everything, how did dinosaurs and people not co-exist?  You asked me what language God speaks because you were worried that he may not understand someone when they got to Heaven.  You asked a lot of things this year I didn’t have concrete answers to, and it made me realize what an old soul you truly are.

To understand the chaos, your instinct was to prepare for the worst. To ease the anxiety, you wanted to understand the ‘why’ and ‘what if’s’ of our life.  Some days we had fascinating conversations about a parallel universe and what conclusions you had settled on, and why they maybe didn’t agree with mine. Other days you were so frustrated that no one can give you the exact answers to ease your mind that it caused trust issues and fighting… So. Much. Fighting.   These trust issues caused perfectionism as you began to live in fear of the unknown and the best way to combat fear is to have everything be as it was planned. But there’s no such thing as a happy perfectionist.

What I want you know someday is that this year was hard.  It was hard for me; it was hard for you. It was hard for your dad and your sister (I hope by now you’ve accepted she really does exist). Now, look back and realize that we survived it.  I want you to take a moment whenever you read this and think back and notice that we got through to the other side, and although we have a long way to go yet, and I can’t predict the future, as I am writing this, you are asleep in your bed, right where you should be. You are OK. You will always find a way to be OK because you are strong, and you are not alone, for you are surrounded by the energy of those of us that love you, by those that have passed, by the energy you so strongly absorb from others, and I will always be here for you.  

By age 10, you have seen more ‘life’ and its fragility than many see before 40, and as much as I would hit a reset button on your last few years in a heartbeat if I could, I also know that because of these years, you will be able to walk winding paths and learn languages others couldn’t even consider.  As you inhale and feel your lungs fill with air, remember that life has a way of shaking up the energy to make space for new things, and while you wait for the dust to settle so you can see the new path, rest and acceptance is best.  Learn what to do and not do from watching instead of planning.   Find ways to be better at this in the moment than I am and handle the chaos with more grace and fewer tantrums. If you can accept now that nothing is or ever will be exactly what you planned, that perfection does not exist, and that you’re better off trusting physics than fighting it, you will be happier, more content, more successful and breathe easier every day no matter what foreign city you find yourself standing in. 

You are smart, competitive, intuitive and think with your whole body. You drive me crazy with your constant need to talk back, demand answers and reject rules or directions.  But I know that someday, all of those qualities mean you will advocate for yourself, you will be able to lead others and you will have both instincts and empathy.  You will be more likely to question things first so you will be taken advantage of less, and I wish I had been more like you at a younger age.  Please don’t allow your anxiety and quest to create a perfect crystal overpower these qualities. If you hone them, you will be the force that guides the energy instead of just survives it. 

Happy 10^th Birthday, Peanut.  Please know that I will worry about you and for you every day of your life so you don’t have to, because there’s no such thing as a happy perfectionist and my wish for you this year is that you re-learn to trust and feel secure again, but my biggest wish for you in life is simply that you’re happy. Here’s to double digits- may the next 10 years bring you clarity in ways that allows your head to rest while your old and fearless soul learns to embrace entropy with a smile, like you’re in on the secret.

Love,

Mom.

Right: Grandma Ginny and Sawyer playing checkers, June 2019
Left: Sawyer (9) and Justin, May 2022

Rest in Peace Virginia Letizia,
I will forever feel your energy and miss your smile.
November 21, 1927 – July 17, 2022