Deep Reflection: On Perfecting Perfection | On Criticism, Fragility, and the Mirror of Self 📚 #WritingCulture
HOW TO RESPOND TO CRITICISM WHEN YOU'RE ALREADY PERFECT
This morning on deck, I caught myself polishing a brass fitting that already gleamed. The Mediterranean light bounced off it so brightly that I had to squint, yet I kept rubbing, convinced it could shine more. It was not about the brass, of course, but about the unease of leaving something less than flawless, as if imperfection would betray me to the gaze of others.
Perfection is rarely about the thing itself. It is about the fear of being seen as inadequate. What unsettles us most is not the flaw, but the exposure. The imagined critic peers through every surface, and we hurry to correct, to anticipate, to outwit the possibility of reproach. We even begin to perfect our responses to criticism, attempting to close the circle so tightly that no judgment can pierce it. Yet in that effort, the very fragility of the self is revealed.
Philosophically, this points to a paradox. To defend our self-idealization we submit to an endless labor of control. What begins as care becomes tyranny, a theatre where we play both actor and audience, applauding our own vigilance while quietly exhausted by it. The danger is not in being criticized, but in becoming captive to the fantasy of invulnerability.
Culturally, this logic permeates our world of image and commentary. Every platform rewards polish, the careful curation of self. We no longer only edit our photos, we edit our perceived responses, our reactions, even our supposed indifference. A false calm, a strategic silence, a crafted vulnerability: all polished brass. The critic outside has been internalized, and we perform endlessly for their imagined gaze.
Existentially, the freedom lies not in silencing criticism but in learning to breathe within it. To remain imperfect is not to fail, it is to remain human. A fitting shines most truly when it carries the salt of the sea, the patina of weather, the trace of touch. Perhaps the same is true of us. The story worth living is not the one that deflects every remark, but the one that embraces incompleteness as its own kind of strength.
Reflection
Perhaps the pursuit of perfection serves something essential in us, mobilizing our energies toward growth, pushing us beyond our current boundaries. Without this impulse, would there be art, meaning, the deep search for what lies beyond ourselves? The danger emerges not in the striving itself, but when perfection becomes compulsion, when psychic energy turns rigid rather than fluid. Here is where that brass fitting taught me something: the drive toward beauty and excellence can remain, but freed from the tyranny of invulnerability. What protects us can also imprison us, and sometimes the perfectionist within is both guardian and jailer.
—#WritingCulture— by Ellis Zeitmann ThinkZeit
#WritingCulture #InkOfTheDay #ExistentialThinking #GoingOnBeing #PhilosophyOfLife