In the classroom, on my home turf, I continued to strut my own kind of stuff. My brain stuff. In sixth form, where I took my best subjects, I consolidated my position as the one who had the answers, who got the top marks in the exam, who was despatched by the group to intercede if there was a problem with a teacher. Sometimes I enjoyed it; sometimes I corrected a teacher. Sometimes I wished I could be less conspicuous, as I felt during a session after the English mock A level when I was taking my turn to go over my paper with the teacher; she spent perhaps a little too long telling me how good the work was and another girl broke in with, ‘Can you find some time for me now – I mean, I know I’m not a prodigy but . . .’
Freud says in The Interpretation of Dreams that one of the most common dreams he has come across in his practice is one in which the subject risks failing an exam which he or she has long since passed in waking life, panics, and then realizes that they’ve already succeeded and needn’t sit it again. I’ve lost count of the number of nights I’ve spent at my old school, at my real advanced age, flapping about because A levels are coming up and I’ve missed all the classes, before remembering with relief that actually I passed them years ago. In a variant version of the same dream it is the last day of school – for the second time – but I can’t leave because I can’t find a bag or box big enough to take all my books home in. According to Freud, the purpose of such dreams is to reassure the dreamer that they have already proved their capacity for rising to a difficult challenge, however daunting it may have appeared at the time. I don’t feel reassured by them though: I feel trapped.
The school prided itself on its Oxbridge entrance record, and would back no unlikely candidates, so any interested upper sixth formers had to go round and ask their teachers if they would support an application from them, and, if so, in which subjects. The effect of this – in my competitive mind at least – was that it sorted all girls into two categories: Oxbridge material and, less impressively, non-Oxbridge material. Getting a place at Oxbridge would prove, surely, that I was who the teachers thought I could be, and not the useless lump I feared I was. On the other hand, none of the courses offered at either university interested me that much. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to go to university at all – after all, Woody Allen hadn’t, so it obviously wasn’t necessary for the comic writer I’d decided I was going to be. I sent off for some film school prospectuses; I read them, saw that I was entirely unqualified either for entry or funding, and reluctantly threw them away.
At least at Cambridge they had Footlights; lots of people I admired had come up through Footlights. The teachers were happy to support my application. Feeling that I had somehow to compensate for my privileged and private education, I applied for a place to read social and political sciences at the most left-wing college I could find and got a comfortably low-ish ABB offer.
‘Are you happy, now you’ve got what you want?’ asked my Auntie Yetta. ‘Because you made your mother miserable.’
7. Susan E. Swedo, ‘Rituals and Releasers: An Ethological Model of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder’ in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in Children and Adolescents, ed. Judith L. Rapoport (American Psychiatric Press Inc., Washington, 1989)
8. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (Jonathan Cape, London, 1949). A new translation by Sheila Malorany-Chevallier and Constance Borde has recently appeared from the same publisher.
Perfection
42. When I read I have the impression I have missed something important and must go back and reread the passage at least two or three times.
The Padua Inventry
———
I am now to review the last year, and find little but dismal vacuity, neither business nor pleasure; much intended, and little done.
Samuel Johnson, Prayers and Meditations
Recently, I’ve noticed that the A level dreams are beginning to give way to undergraduate dreams. These follow a similar pattern, except that I decide to drop out after a few days, as instead of merely being in a panic about exams I am entirely hysterical about everything. In these dreams I am clearly quite unable to look after myself in the most basic ways, let alone undertake degree-level study, and the only thing to do is to pack up and go home.
There’s a conversation I had with my father that I really wish I could have again. It took place during the summer holiday between my last term at school and my first at university. I was reading – probably – at the breakfast-room table, when my father came and sat down next to me and asked if he could have a word. He began hesitantly: ‘Joanne, you’re eighteen now, you’re an adult, you’re about to leave home, and I just wanted to know – have I been a good father to you?’
His eyes were wet. I didn’t know what to say. What I would say now is, ‘Of course, you’ve been a wonderful father.’ What I said then was, ‘Well . . . it would have been good if you’d been more involved, if you hadn’t left so much to Mum, but – for a man of your generation, I think you’ve been as good as you could have been, yes.’
‘I wanted to know because . . . the only thing I’ve ever done that I’ve been proud of was visiting refuseniks9 in Russia . . . and of course I’m proud of you and your brother – apart from that, the past is a dead weight.’
I don’t remember what I said then; I think we both sat there sadly contemplating his dead weight, neither of us knowing how to shift it. We didn’t have the tools.
Now I would know how to deal with it, in principle at least. I’ve had several lots of cognitive behavioural therapy; I possess half a shelf full of sensible books packed with fair and balanced statements such as:
No one is perfect. All of us, at one point or another, have violated our own principles or standards. We feel guilty and ashamed if we believe that what we did means that we are bad. But violations do not necessarily mean that we are bad. Our actions may have been linked to a particular situation or to a specific time in our lives.10
No one is perfect, no one ever could be perfect; a certain degree of imperfection is inevitable, forgivable. This is just the kind of thing you are supposed to say to someone when they show you their dead weight. However, it would not be an appropriate observation to make at a job interview, a sales presentation, or the launch of a party manifesto. In these contexts, perfection and perfectionism are things to aspire to, part of a shiny, elite little group of concepts along with ‘excellence’, ‘quality’, ‘the best’, ‘Britain’s leading’, and so on. And don’t forget ‘genius’, which Thomas Carlyle (according to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations) defined as a ‘transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all’. You’re a perfectionist, are you? You accept nothing less than the best? Then I would be a fool not to accept your tender, and I look forward to our working together to compete at the highest level in today’s demanding marketplace.
In the discourse of clinical psychology, on the other hand, perfectionism will get you into all kinds of trouble. A quick search of the Psycinfo citation index produced forty-seven hits, including the following: ‘Action monitoring and perfectionism in anorexia nervosa’; ‘Parental influences on social anxiety: the sources of perfectionism’; ‘Perfectionism and Depressive Symptoms in Early Adolescence’; ‘Psychological correlates of fatigue: examining depression, perfectionism, and automatic negative thoughts’; ‘Recurrent pain among university students: contributions of self-efficacy and perfectionism to the pain experience’; ‘Relation between childhood peer victimization and adult perfectionism: are victims of indirect aggression more perfectionistic?’ Here we are looking at a very different cluster of concepts: anorexia nervosa, depression, pain and victimization. We can add OCD as well.
Some psychologists have even spoken of ‘clinical perfectionism’ as a pathological trait in its own right, suggesting that ‘the defining feature of clinically significant perfectionism is the overdependence of self-evaluation on the determined pursuit (and achievement) of self-imposed personally demanding standards of performance in at least
one salient domain, despite the occurrence of adverse consequences.’11 This perfectionism is ‘maintained by the biased evaluation of the pursuit and achievement’ of these standards. If she does not meet her standards, the perfectionist will not re-evaluate these standards but instead will ‘react with self-criticism’; on the other hand, if she does meet her standards, then these standards are ‘re-evaluated as being insufficiently demanding’.
This is not the gilded perfectionism of marketing language, which promises both efficiency of process and excellence of product. This is a perfectionism which impedes the process and results, as often as not, in no product at all. If you can’t finish a piece of work until you believe that it is absolutely perfect – or, worse than that, if you cannot even start a task until you can be certain that you are going to perform it perfectly all the way, then you are likely to bring upon yourself a whole sequence of ‘adverse consequences’.
Procrastination and avoidance: ‘I can’t continue with this chapter until I’ve read through every paper cited in that literature search’; ‘My mind is in the wrong state to start working now, it isn’t clear and focused enough, I’ll just clear a few things up, check my email again, then I’d better call my mother back.’
Paralysis: ‘There’s too much to read – I can’t get on top of it’; ‘I’ve got five possible first paragraphs for this chapter and I can’t choose which one – is it three o’clock already?’
Hurried, sub-standard work: ‘Now I’ve done nothing all day: I’ll just write any old thing down – at least I’ll have something to show for it then.’
Or, alternatively, an Abandoned project: ‘Now I’ve wasted a whole day – again. No point trying now – I might as well give up.’
And, ultimately, Depression: ‘In fact, I might as well give up altogether and give my advance back. I always fuck up everything I do. I’ve let myself and everyone else down. No wonder I’m constipated and tired and have a headache – it’s because I deserve it. I won’t achieve anything ever in my life and then I’ll die young and in pain with nobody at my bedside because by then they’ll all have seen me for what I am and I’ll disgust them.’
How I managed to leave school with three A levels and an S level history pass I’ll never know. I got As in my hard subjects – Russian and modern history – but in English, a combination of a couple of awkward papers and my own boredom with the texts tripped me up, and I earned a mere B. This made no practical difference, because I had more than met my Cambridge offer, but at the time I was as devastated as if I had failed. I couldn’t have articulated it to anyone at the time, but that B was an open wound in my brilliant carapace, and now the disgusting mush beneath it would be on display to anyone who cared to look. I was inconsolable. I turned a trip to Scotland with my parents and my Kentish Town friend, which should have been a celebration, into purgatory for all concerned. I whinged at the Edinburgh Festival, then I sulked in the Highlands. I was ungracious, and I was irritable, and when everyone else had gone to bed I picked and picked and picked.12
When it comes to clinical perfectionism, work is definitely one of my ‘salient domains’. I sabotage myself in this area less consistently than I used to, but it has taken me many years to get to the point where I could even contemplate producing a book-length manuscript, much less sit down and write it. Appearance is another domain for me, which is why I hardly bother with it: I’m never going to be Miss World, so what’s the point in trying? Housework, fortunately, is a far from salient domain. Mothering is only salient in some of its aspects, so my son gets to eat sugar, watch TV and even do both at once. What is salient for me in all ways at all times is how I treat other people. My default position is to feel entirely responsible for the feelings of everyone I come into contact with, for as long as I come into contact with them. If the cashier who serves me doesn’t smile, then it’s my fault. If I don’t clear out of the way as quickly as possible, so that the next person in the queue can’t get served the very next second, and they look a bit fed up, then it’s my fault. If I phone somebody at the wrong moment, so that by phoning them I cause them thirty seconds of extra stress, then that stress is on my head because I should have realized that it was the wrong moment. If somebody walks past me in the street, and I think something negative about them – say, She shouldn’t wear that skirt with those legs, and look at that VPL – then this in itself makes me so much of a bitch that I might just as well have gone up to her and shouted it in her face. Only the people closest to me ever find out when I’m upset with them, because there’s always a good reason why someone else might do something upsetting to me, something they can’t help, whereas I should always know better. This domain extends a fair way back in time, with its boundary somewhere around the beginning of my adolescence, which makes for a weighty past. Not a dead sort of weight in my case – it’s more like a big sack of angry snakes.
That holiday in Scotland is a serpentine memory; my three years at Cambridge are a writhing nest. Arriving with a shameful B on my results slip was just the start of it. Counting down the miles in the back of my parents’ car that autumn, I realized too late that I hadn’t really wanted to go to Cambridge at all; what I’d really wanted to do was to get in, prove that I could do it, and then walk off to some unspecified, alternative future. But I had failed to come up with a better plan, so here I was, in the back of my parents’ car, travelling further and further away from the only places where I’d ever felt safe, and from almost everybody I’d ever known. Some of my friends from school were coming up at the same time, and I had every intention of going to find them in their respective colleges as soon as I could, but apart from them, there was no one there with any good reason to put up with me, listen to me, or give a damn. I had, in the hope of finding a boyfriend, deliberately chosen a mixed-sex college, but I had almost no experience of being taught by men, let alone of socializing with them. I had been to very few parties, hardly ever stayed away from home, never managed more than a sip of alcohol; I had never needed to manage my own time, organize my own work, make a bare institutional room my own, make sure that I ate healthily, launder my own clothes, wash up my own crockery, clean up my own messes or sort out my own problems. I had never bothered getting a Saturday job, and had refused to learn to drive. All in all, I had spent the last five years studiously avoiding responsibility of any kind. I was going to an establishment that worked on the assumption that I was an adult, when I was still in so many ways a child.
At school I had resented the notion that I might be seen as innocent: it implied a backwardness in worldly matters, and I could not bear to be thought backward at anything. I bought new clothes for my new life, and began to wear my hair loose, rather than in a schoolgirlish ponytail. I went straight for the people with the coolest personae, and attached myself to them, in the hope that some of their sophistication would rub off on me. For the first couple of terms, I followed this group around, whining about how miserable I was and asking them why they drank and smoked when it was so bad for them, and trying lamely to get them to laugh at my jokes and tell me I was pretty. I made innumerable faux-pas, usually to do with other people’s sex lives, because I had not yet learned to distinguish harmless gossip from damaging scandal. I sat up with them in darkly decorated rooms till two in the morning listening to the right sort of music and waiting for a transformative moment that never came. I even fancied myself in love with one of the cool people. He was very into his music, he wore a shirt and black jacket at all times, so I thought that he would be perfect for the girl I was trying to be.
Really he was no more sophisticated than I was, and we mis-read each other disastrously. We flirted for a few days, attempted to kiss with limited success, each of us thinking that the other was the experienced one who would pass their experience on. He soon lost interest, but I had already developed a massive crush, with which I would bore anyone who made the mistake of opening their door to me.
It ended rather messily. Egged on by a new best friend fr
om another college, who liked drama as much as I did, I put some anonymous postcards in his pigeonhole in the postroom. With a good black ink pen I bought especially for the purpose, I decorated them with line drawings and added what I thought were appropriate entries from a pocket dictionary of quotations, also specially bought. The first said: ‘Tread softly, for you tread upon my dreams.’ The second said, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ It was early spring by then so I added some snowdrops I’d picked from the college beds. Then I posted a bunch of red roses and a somewhat overheated Swinburne quote with more roses in it. Unfortunately, and unknown to me, there were other things going on in that boy’s life: another musician had been sending him death threats, and he had hoped that the snowdrops were from a girl in Queen’s whom he liked – and whom I was trying to make friends with, as a way of getting closer to him and keeping an eye on the competition. The first I knew of all of this was when he came rushing up to me and my new best friend in Front Court waving my Swinburne note in my face and shouting, ‘HEY! HEY!’ He shoved the note under my nose. ‘Is this your handwriting?’ Yes, I said. ‘Then FUCK OFF!’ I escaped home for the weekend, and ran a temperature. When I returned, there was an apologetic note shoved under my door; later on he explained that he hadn’t meant to be so angry – it was just that my friend and I had looked conspiratorial at that moment – but I got the message. We tried to be ‘friends’ for a bit, but soon gave that up.
Years later, when stalkers were big news, I became preoccupied with the idea that I might be, essentially, a Stalker, and tormented myself over my irreversible creepiness, but the truth was that I was a silly little girl who had no idea how to behave towards men, and who thought that the little notes would make me seem intriguing, sophisticated and mysterious. It’s not behaviour I’ve ever been inclined to repeat. And it was the last time I would so much as kiss a man for six years. I obsessed about them – sometimes I realized they were obsessing about me. I made a fool of myself in front of men I liked and was sometimes offhand to the point of cruelty with men who liked me, because their interest in me made them threatening as well as ineligible. By the time I reached the third year, I was obsessing in my diary about a student in the year below, who had been flirting with me for a couple of terms – and whom I suspected had been put up to it for a joke, because why would he have bothered otherwise?
Woman Who Thought too Much, The Page 8