ADHD – A Personal Walkthrough & Guide

There’s a genre of fan-created, high-difficulty Mario content called “Mario Kaizo”. For those of you haven’t heard of it, Mario Kaizo takes the base mechanics of your typical Mario game and cranks the difficulty up to 25. Practically every single button press must be precise and perfectly timed to avoid dying instantly. Although, I’ve personally never given Mario Kaizo a shot, I’m pretty sure I was playing my life on Kaizo for years.

While not everyone with ADHD copes by being a perfectionist, many of us do. It might not even be obvious that we’ve turned into a perfectionist to compensate for all our perceived short-comings. I was a perfectionist for years and didn’t even realize it.

Not that long ago, I was expecting myself to flawlessly do every single little thing that was theoretically possible for a person to do in a day, and would put myself down whenever I slipped up. A part of my brain was near constantly putting energy into deciding if I was doing whatever I was doing “right” or if I was doing the most optimal thing to do at that moment. Even relaxing and taking time off felt like something I had to do “right” and could thus fail. 

As you might imagine, expecting that level of optimization made me very stressed, frequently miserable, and regularly disappointed in myself for not doing everything I felt I HAD to do just to do enough. I never outright put this into words at the time, but I think I felt like I didn’t deserve to be proud of myself unless I had managed to be perfect.

I was forcing myself to play the Kaizo version of life and then got mad at myself whenever I didn’t make it through the nearly-impossible level on my first try.

About a year ago, though, I finally started to see the perfectionism and high-expectations I was imposing on myself after my therapist had asked me to do a little exercise. She told me to track, for just one day, how many times I caught me being mean to myself in some way, and while I found I wasn’t explicitly mean very often, I realized I wasn’t exactly being kind and that I was judging myself a lot.

So, always one for bettering myself, I decided to work on being less of a perfectionist and using kinder self-talk.. and expected myself to do it perfectly.

What could possibly go wrong?!

…

What Went Wrong

Well, turns out, in trying to be kinder to myself, I actually wound up judging myself even more. See, I’d get a little annoyed at myself for something and then immediately judge myself for getting annoyed, but then since I was just harsh and judged myself there, I’d judge myself again for the judgment. And as a bonus layer of judgment, I’d also judge myself for still trying to be so perfect about all of it!

If I tried to tell my brain to just shut up, it only made it worse, giving me yet another thing to criticize myself for. I was trapping myself in an infinite loop, self-criticism endlessly bouncing around my head like the world’s worst prism.

It was very quickly driving me nuts. (My brain is busy enough already, thank you!)

And then, I had an epiphany. 💡

I suddenly remembered the concept of how you’ll never find happiness if you’re constantly chasing it. And I realized.. that I wasn’t going to find inner peace or love for myself by beating myself up. 

In order to get out of this Chinese Finger Trap, this perfectionist quicksand, I had to go against my instincts, stop struggling.. and just relax. 

How could I do that, though, without giving myself more to judge myself for? (I didn’t want to wind up in some even worse “relax OR ELSE!” kind of trap!)

And then.. it hit me. I would thwart my perfectionism and escape my crushing expectations and self-judgment by setting a new goal for myself. 

That new goal – be imperfect. 😏

Objective Set – Be Imperfect

So, intentionally being imperfect probably looks like a fairly strange goal on paper, but for past-me, it was quite possibly the best goal I could ever set. For one thing, it’s a goal that is literally impossible to fail. For, you see, if you fail in your goal to be imperfect, that means you were not, in fact, perfect, and thus you actually succeeded !

But even more importantly, under this new goal, I found that after all those years of constant internal judgment, I finally felt justified and empowered to rebel against that unkind voice of perfection in my head. Now whenever perfectionism would quietly whisper to me that I wasn’t good enough, that I had to do more, or that I was failing, I would just laugh and tell it to get lost. Perfectionism had no place when my goal was to be imperfect.  

“Oh? What’s that, Perfectionism? You think it took me a little too long to finish that email this morning? Hah, so what? Way to go me for being imperfect! 🥳”

“You think I should start the laundry before I start on dinner because that would be the most efficient use of my time? Pffbt, who cares? Both things are gonna get done eventually.”

“What? Perfectionism thinks that I need to do something that isn’t actually important or meaningful to me because of some nonsense expectation? Ah, Perfectionism, you’re so funny. I think I’ll just focus on my real goal of being imperfect and uh.. not do that thing!” 

Honestly, it was a ton of fun to finally be empowered to shut those kinds of thoughts down and tell them “NOPE!” My perfectionism had bullied me, run me ragged, and put me down for years! Now I was the one in charge and my perfectionism couldn’t really argue because I was still doing what that part of me loved best – achieving a goal.

Perfectionism didn’t run my life anymore, I did. And it felt great! 

Zen-Mode Unlocked – Expecting Less, Living More

Over time, the voice of my perfectionism got quieter and quieter and now I hardly ever hear from it. As a result, it’s gotten more and more natural for me to be nicer to myself, to not sweat the small stuff, and to genuinely respect my needs. 

After years of playing life the hard way and telling myself my accomplishments weren’t enough because I had failed to do the impossible, I finally stopped treating life like Kaizo and just let myself have fun. 

And guess what? Now that I ask myself to do less and genuinely let myself live life imperfectly, I actually accomplish more!

It turns out, I have the motivation to do things when I feel good about myself for doing them and I have the energy to do more of the things that matter to me when I’m not expending so much energy constantly judging myself and forcing myself to do stuff I don’t really wanna do.

I am as on top of my life as I was when I was constantly pushing myself, only now, I’m actually happy. ✨

So, if any of my experience with perfectionism sounds similar to your own experience, maybe consider setting yourself a new goal of being imperfect. You might be surprised by how much closer to being “perfect” your life can be when you try less to make it that way. 😄