The Mind That Cannot Clear You

#7 in the perfectionism series

On asking the wrong instrument for the wrong answer

Part II of V — The Mechanism · Article 7 of 25

Here’s something I had to face, eventually, that I’d been working around for years.

I had been waiting, in some unspoken way, for my own mind to tell me I was okay. Nothing dramatic about it. I wasn’t sitting around hoping for inner pronouncements. But there was a low-level project running that I think a lot of perfectionists are running, which is the project of trying to think your way to the feeling of being enough.

This is what the constant self-evaluation is, when you watch it from a small distance. The mind reviewing the day’s performance. The mind grading the interaction. The mind running the post-mortem on the meeting you’ve already left. Each pass is, on some level, an attempt to arrive at a verdict that says: it was okay, you were okay, you can put this down now. The verdict almost never comes. When it does come, it doesn’t last. The next case is already being opened in the next courtroom over.

What took me a long time to notice is that this whole arrangement is structurally impossible. The mind isn’t going to issue the verdict, because the mind isn’t designed to issue verdicts of okayness. The mind is designed to scan for problems. That’s almost the totality of what it does. Sit at your desk for a minute and observe. The mind will surface — within seconds — something that needs attention. Something undone. Something off. Something that could be better. It does this with no prompting at all. It would be doing this even if your life were objectively perfect. The mind is a problem-finder. It finds problems whether they exist or not.

If you understand what kind of instrument the mind is, you understand why the perfectionist’s central project has been doomed from the start. The instrument cannot do what you’ve been asking it to do. It’s like asking a thermometer to play music. It’s the wrong tool. It’s not that it’s malfunctioning. It’s that you’ve assigned it work outside its category.

This is a freeing observation, but only if you take it the right way. The wrong way to take it is as another item to be ashamed of. “I’ve been doing it wrong.” That’s just more of the same. The mind, predictably, generates a new “not good enough” thought about the not-good-enough thoughts. The loop closes around the very awareness that was trying to escape it.

The right way to take it, in my experience, is to register that there’s no verdict coming because there can be no verdict coming, and the project of waiting for one can therefore be set down. Without any drama, and without even deciding to set it down — because deciding is just more thinking and the mind will start grading the decision. More like noticing that the project was never going to work, and that the energy you’ve been putting into it has been spent on a non-thing.

What replaces the project? I’d like to give you a clean answer, but I’m not sure there is one. What happens, slowly, is that you stop looking inside the courtroom for the verdict, because you’ve realized the courtroom is empty. The judge was never on the bench. The case was running by itself. When you stop attending it so closely, it doesn’t disappear, but it gets a lot quieter. The mind continues finding problems. You continue noticing them. The crucial difference is that you’ve stopped staking your sense of being okay on the next verdict that’s about to come down.

There’s a phrase in the tradition I keep not naming that I think gets this right. The idea is that wellbeing — call it okayness, call it underlying soundness, call it whatever you like — isn’t something you produce. It’s something that’s there when the thinking quiets. It’s the floor. It was always the floor. The reason you can’t feel it is that the thinking has been so loud, so constant, so insistent that the floor never gets noticed. Quieting the thinking isn’t a discipline you perform. It’s something that happens when you stop trying so hard to get the verdict.

I’m not sure I’ve worded this well. The basic point is: stop waiting for the mind to clear you. It can’t. It’s the wrong instrument. The clearance was never going to come from there. You can put down the long argument with yourself. The thing you’ve been trying to talk yourself into is already true, underneath the talking.

Next in the series — every Friday. See the Table of Contents for the next article in this series.

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