This has been a question that has plagued my mind for many an age, and several yonks.
It plagues me not because I want to go out there and declare myself as on - this is something literally everybody does whenever they feel the need to straighten a picture on a wall, before attributing their perfectionism to having Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Everyone has it, apparently.
Rather, it plagues me on a much deeper level.
My whole life has been a curse when it comes to relationships with people. Friends, family, girlfriends. I'm sure this is not unique, but in 30 years I've yet to find a single individual who sees things in a deeper way, on my level.
This is not to say my level is any higher than others, on the contrary, I'm quite aware many people around me share this problem, thanks to an old XKCD comic:
But my level is perhaps shifted to the left, through a fifth dimension and crammed into the corner somewhere, perhaps nearby other peoples' levels, but I can't see in all the darkness.
There are always people to share some things, each person good for one or two. In this person, I can hang out and chill out and have beers, in this person I can share secrets with and general concerns about life, this person I can discuss political opinions or be all jokey and get drunk with, or take a social backseat in friend groups. This person and i have inside jokes and that person has the same taste in music as me.
Except... do they share my music taste? To me, music is possibly the greatest determiner of one's depth of relationship with another. Not only taste but passion, excitement, diversity, insight. philosophy. Using this as a basis for friendship, I have nobody.
There has never in my 31 years been an individual who shares equal passion with me in equal things. Going to movies, I might find myself crying, as I strangely often do, but rarely do I cry because of some sad death or emotional moment - these often seem cheesy and cliche to me - for me, it's almost always the soundtrack or spectacular visuals that do it.
Often, the first things I do when I get home is get the soundtrack up on YouTube if possible, if not, the composer, and dig into the details, play it on repeat, really understand the motive of the composer. As I write I've had the same track from Made in Abyss on loop for about 30 minutes now, after having already downloaded the whole OST of course.
It would be natural after this to run to your closest friend and start sharing your exciting discovery with them: Check out this anime, check out the soundtrack, listen to this moment, how it reminds me of this and that, likely due to the sustained 7th over the arpeggiated ostinato. Unfortunately, there's nobody I know with whom I can do this kind of thing with. Indeed, there never has been.
I once knew a girl at University who shared the same level of passion in music, and in the same bands during those days; Dream Theater, Dredg and so on. But time moves ever forward, and my tastes diversified. I enjoyed Cradle of Filth (death metal) as much as I enjoyed Bon Iver (indie folk?) and Nobuo Uematsu (Game Soundtrack composer) and Steve Reich (minimalist composer) and Thomas Ades (contemporary composer) and so on. The girl, on the other hand, seemed to remain in 2008 in terms of taste, at least from my perspective. We naturally grew apart after graduation, our one primary bond now broken.
Again, this is not unique, it's the very nature of growing as a person to find oneself becoming distant with old friends, and closer to new ones to better match your preferred surroundings. If you are lucky enough to find 'the one', or your soul mate or BFF or whatever variation of close relationships exist, you tend to share enough experience and time together that these things grow and change together, at least in sync enough that you remain a strongly bonded pair. This is presumably the end goal in most people's lives anyway, to be surrounded by numerous people like this.
For me, I've only ever found the occasional person with a deep connection with me, and that connection is usually a single line between us, maybe a couple. Any more and it becomes a strictly Online relationship, like an old friend in the US I met on an old composer's forum. We remained in touch for many years and shared more chat history than anyone else in my online life.
We'd talk about everything, right down to the embarrassing or despairing details. But we don't talk anymore. The bonds we had shifted once again, and there simply weren't enough other connections between us to keep our friendship fully intact.
When I graduated from Unversity, I had a competition with this friend, still close at the time. The competition was to see who could have the least friends on Facebook. I managed to get mine down from about 300 to 60 over a few days, having gotten rid of every relationship I made over the three years at University. A silly joke with a friend was more important to me than any relationship I had managed over the course of three years.
The girlfriend I had for 8 months or something, I had simply because I felt I should have had a girlfriend. We had some deep connections too; our love of anime and Lord of the Rings, music in general and so on, but we were clearly on totally different levels, many miles apart, and It took me 8 months to realize I didn't want to endure anything less than a perfect connection with her.
Thinking about the modern day, I wonder if I could simply cut every current relationship out of my life and see my condition be any different at all. And this brings me back to the title: Am I a Perfectionist?
Why do I feel like I need every friend to fulfill every desire I expect in a friendship? Surely most people are going through life with at least similar thoughts to some degree? I wonder if the majority of people, those who don't overthink everything, are just content to settle with basically whatever. Do they bury their deeper thoughts and feelings? Do they even have any to begin with?
I know for a fact that people who went through difficult childhoods and even adulthoods tend to be more empathetic and thoughtful than the wealthy and those middle class families that simply go through the motions, from school to graduation to life partner, to dog and cat, to marriage, to child, to purchasing a property in Spain, to retirement with swimming pool, to death.
My experience shows me that these people either are incapable of deeper thought about their current lifestyle or care little for such thoughts. At least until their mid-life crises. One of my girlfriends literally broke up with me on the basis that my family seemed complicated. She simply didn't have the emotional space to bother risking any weird family situations, she wanted a nice house with a pool in her home country of Canada, a piano, a car, a school nearby for her kid. Anything that deviated from that was a deal breaker. She naturally grew up in a content and happy family, still together, their bonds strong. The kind of person that would call back home every week and update everybody over skype about a car crash they saw across the street, to which their mother would be quick to say be careful over there!
These people grow up in a comfortable situation, how could they possibly understand the strrife and anguish of others out there. How can they be expected to want to learn about these things? It's surely far better to remain in one's comfort bubble and just kind of ignore the rest of the world's troubles and dump those around you that might seem a bit unstable or unpredictable.
Where was I going with this...
Oh right, perfection. I hate perfection. At least, I hate everybody's idea of perfection. Who would want such a safe lifestyle? Who wants to just float along for 80 years the exact same way everybody else in your neighborhood has done? For me, I find it uncomfortable living in large apartment buildings where you can see other identical large apartment buildings. I can't walk in the street if I know the person in front or behind me are walking at the same pace, with their right leg in sync with mine. I have to stop walking and wait until they're ahead a bit more.
I don't like wearing suits since the only individuality they allow is the color and pattern of your tie. Any other deviation is 'fashionably subtle' - as in, invisible to anybody doing the interview. I, like Richard Dawkins, make a point of wearing oddly colored socks, and I don't find attractive those who have worked their arses off to be classically beautiful or sexy.
On the same level, I don't like standard relationships, relationships that have one or two connections that could likely break at any point with little consequence. I am forever searching for something I don't quite know. I'm never satisfied in the people around me. They fulfill something on some level, but they'll never be the person lying next to me with headphone splitters. They'll never see me cry in awe of a musical notation technique, and they'll never see me jump with excitement over some new thing or hobby I discovered.
I feel the chances are close to 0% that I should ever find what I'm looking for, precisely because I don't technically know what I'm looking for. All I can say is that it's my interpretation of perfection, and I don't think that exists.
There's a lot of quotes going around on Facebook lately that basically touch on the idea of how you can be surrounded by all your friends and still be very much alone. I wonder how many of those people spend their lives in this situation, and how many of these people only relate to it for half a dozen months until they find their next boy/girlfriend or BFF and suddenly life is candy again.
I wonder if I'll have managed to swallow my expectations and just float through life with a failed business venture, a half-studied masters in economics, a share in a Caribbean hotel and a rented yacht. Or, will I find this perfection, where everybody around me shares a deep love of all the things that make me stare into infinity, unable to grasp the feeling buzzing through me?
Well, only about 40-50 more years left to find out, I guess!
