SOL 14- Perfectionism

          Personally, I am an incredibly particular perfectionist. I will meticulously spend hours on pointless endeavors like math homework just to draw perfect parabolas and create beautifully symmetrical parenthesis. There is nothing like a perfectly legible and neat page of math notes in consistent handwriting. That last part is hard for me because I have a rather messy, angular scrawl for handwriting. The one thing that I can do to make my notes neat is I will shrink my handwriting to perfectly fit on top of each line on a page of lined paper so that everything lines up. Point is, I'm particular. I don't know why, but I have a very specific sense of aesthetics and general looks.

          When people say that others fish for compliments, it really bothers me. Personally, because of my perfectionism, someone will compliment me and I will respond with a long list of genuine flaws and problems with whatever they complimented me on out of habit. I am currently in the process of learning how to take a compliment. If something I did is good, I will tell you that. If not, I will bombard you with reasons that I think whatever it is looks horrendous. I feel like there are many personal troubles that come along with perfectionism. I will take forever to do what others can do in a minute, and literally everything bothers me. Lets just say mounting takes forever.

          For example, a project from earlier this year. One of my projects about museum collections was a massive wheel with different types of collections on different sections of it. I got many compliments on this project, but personally I absolutely hated it. What other people took as fine I took as something full of crooked mounting, cramped space, a lack of distinction between the paper and the mounting paper, etc. I eventually had to learn to just accept the compliments over my crappy curves mounted with scissors. Once it was out of the hallway, about a week before expo, I got to tear the entire thing apart and restart, which is probably one of the most satisfying and therapeutic things I have ever done. 

          Overall, I am an extremely particular perfectionist, to a degree where it can cause me more harm than benefit.