Lynne S. Gots, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist
Pride of (Parking) Place
By Lynne Gots, posted on October 18th, 2011.
May I brag a little? I am an excellent parker, parallel and otherwise. One look at my car’s bumpers, though, and you’d see that my vehicular handling skills haven’t always been so advanced.
The garage in my office building is a poorly lit labyrinth of narrow turns and awkwardly positioned posts. As my Toyota will attest, I used to have a lot of trouble gauging the angles for optimal entry into a space. Once, rounding a corner too fast and too sharply, I heard the sickening crunch of side panel meeting concrete. I had to improvise some creative bodywork on the spot so I wouldn’t have to face my husband’s reaction when I got home.
Now I’m extra careful and much more accustomed to the ins and outs (literally) of the parking garage. I approach it as a game, seeing if I can back into a space on the first try and taking great pleasure in a perfect execution. I admit, it’s become a bit compulsive.
Today I parked badly. There were no dings or dented bumpers; the car was within the lines. But it was crooked, and it really bothered me. I resisted a powerful urge to go back and straighten it out.
If I’d spent the extra few minutes parking again, I would have been happier with the results. But I also would have been late for my first appointment. So I did a quick cost-benefit analysis and decided to adjust my priorities instead of the car. Walking up to my office, I recalled the 80% rule: since I value punctuality much more than parking, I could tolerate an 80% parking job. Not perfect, but perfectly acceptable. It’s a useful mantra for any perfectionist to remember.
Tags: perfectionism
Posted in Perfectionism |
Little People, Revisited
By Lynne Gots, posted on October 3rd, 2011.
I just saw a rousing 25th anniversary production of Les Miz at the Kennedy Center. Rather predictably (this was my fourth viewing) but with no less genuine emotion, my eyes welled up when petit Gavroche sang the anthem, “Little People” as he lay dying on the barricade:
“be careful as you go
cos little people grow
and little people know
when little people fight,
we may look easy pickings
but we got some bite!
so never kick a dog
because it’s just a pup
you’d better run for cover when the pup grows up”
For those of you who’ve spent the last twenty-five years in a cave, Les Misérables is the blockbuster musical based on Victor Hugo’s book of the same name. Gavroche is a street urchin, mascot to the Parisian student revolutionaries and their canary in the mine. He volunteers to scope out the army below and (spoiler alert) gets shot for his efforts.
I thought about Gavroche’s song as I read an essay in the Sunday Times about “Super People.” The author addresses a topic that never fails to make my blood boil, no matter how many times I read or write about it—the pressures kids face in high school to outdo themselves and their peers with mega resumes highlighting their creative talent, altruism, entrepreneurial spirit, and athletic prowess. That’s what it takes these days to stand out from the crowd of equally amazing super achievers. College admissions officials call this being “pointy” as opposed to well rounded (although it seems to me these superstars are pretty well rounded too, a bit like the Appalachians with Mount Washington thrown in for good measure.)
It’s no longer good enough to be good enough. I see a lot of students in my practice who feel bad because they can’t measure up. Many of them are graduates of International Baccalaureate high schools who’ve earned scholarships to university honors programs. Yet they feel like imposters because they haven’t started a foundation for Tibetan orphans or won the Intel Science Competition for a breakthrough in cancer research. The culture of Super Persondom is doing them in.
Now back to Gavroche. Let’s suspend disbelief for a minute and imagine the 19th century Gavroche transported to the 21st century. Say Jean Valjean had carried him to La Sâlpetrière instead of leaving him to die with the rebels. He survives his wounds and, a few years later, decides to parlay his adventures on the barricade into a college application essay:
When I was only twelve, I spearheaded an insurrection of university students. I was shot and lived through a near-death experience. All my friends died. I never went to school but my street education is worth much more than book learning.
And then he wraps it all up with the chorus:
So listen here, professor with your head in the cloud
It’s often kinda useful to get lost in a crowd
So keep your universities — i don’t give a damn
For better or for worse it is the way that i am
I can just picture the excitement in the admissions offices of the Ivy League. Foreign! (According to the Times article, many colleges have recruiters in other countries to promote globalization.) Uneducated but smart! Confident enough to thumb his nose at the establishment!
Voilà. Gavroche’s pointiness wins him a full ride to Harvard: Little Person to Super Person with just a stroke of the quill pen.
Tags: college admissions, perfectionism
Posted in College, Perfectionism |
A Metaphor is a Terrible Thing to Mix
By Lynne Gots, posted on September 29th, 2011.
My tenth grade English teacher, Miss Nagle, taught me to write. In those days before computers, I hammered out my papers on a Smith Corona, which sounds like something that should be served in a long-necked bottle with a lime but actually was an electric typewriter. Miss Nagle was ruthless. Her red-penciled comments splattered the smudgy carbon-copied pages like drops of blood. She was a stickler for grammar, and after three years under her tutelage—first in her class, then as an editor of the school newspaper—I became a sentence structure snob, too.
By the time I got to college, I was a perfectionist about style, often at the expense of substance. Research wasn’t as easy back then as it is today when you can find any reference you need with the click of a mouse. It meant actually going to the library, which, for some reason, intimidated me. Many of my manuscripts came back with remarks like, “Very well-written, but needs more depth.” I often sat for hours in front of that Smith Corona, searching for the perfect word. Writing took forever. It was a chore.
But not any more. Blogging has completely transformed the writing experience for me. I don’t how it happened, but gradually I began relaxing my standards, and suddenly I started having fun. Sentence fragments! No comma after the third item in a series! Using a preposition to end a sentence with! Unnecessary use of exclamation points!!! Whoo! Now the ideas flow so freely I sometimes can’t type fast enough to keep up with them. Sorry, Ms. Nagle. You taught me well, but times have changed.
I’m not saying the only cure for a bad case of writer’s block is to ditch your Strunk and White’s (the style bible, not the bar where you go to drink your Smith Corona). But relaxing the rules sure can free up a lot of mental energy.
There’s just one thing I still can’t bring myself to do. I won’t split an infinitive. After all, even verbs have feelings.
Tags: perfectionism, writer's block
Posted in Perfectionism |
