There are a lot of misconceptions about perfectionism that I want to clear up. Someone once told me that when someone in a job interview asks what your greatest weakness is to respond with “perfectionism” because it makes you come across as serious about your work. Well, they were not wrong. I am very serious about my work, but in a very different and unenviable way.

I started having issues with perfectionism my freshman year of college. I spent most of high school in an abusive relationship and let my academics slide with the exception of English class, as that was the only class I looked forward to. Naturally, when I entered college with an English Adolescent Education major, that passion for English classes took over. I spent the past four years doing backflips to complete assignments to an absurdly overdone level of perfection because I compulsively had to. It was the only thing that kept my mind off of the pain of the abuse.

But there’s more to it than just being a workaholic. Now, I’m not shy about having this condition. I want to speak out about it so that people understand what it actually does to people who have it, so here are my five confessions about being a perfectionist.

1. It’s not about everything being perfect all the time. It’s about failure.

When I say perfect, I don’t mean that everything has to be in straightened rows of three. I mean that what I’m doing can’t be wrong. I have an overwhelming fear of failure because failure means death for me. Things can get particularly dangerous when I don’t score my perfect straight A average- and I’m not being hyperbolic. My line of thought (trigger-warning: suicide) usually goes as follows:

“If English is the only thing I have going for me, and I fail at that, what does that make me? How useful can I be to a world that doesn’t accept second-best? If I fail at this one thing, I’m good at nothing. If I’m pointless, what’s the point in wasting people’s time being alive?”

Failure is the real motivator when it comes to perfectionism, or at least my variety of it. If I am not perfect, I’m wasting everyone’s time and everyone will hate me. I’m letting everyone down.

2. Perfection stems from uncertainty.

There is no such thing as “good enough” when it comes to my work. I cannot settle for average because I’m uncertain about what average looks like. In high school, I was treated like I was stupid even though I still had a 92 average. I went to a hard high school that primes its students for college, and if I was stupid there, college-freshmen-me thought that I’d be massively underprepared when I came to college. Out of fear of failure, perfectionism set in.

I don’t know what “good enough” or average work looks like, so I’d stay up all night writing papers that were unrealistic. Professors would ask for a three-page response, and I’d write ten because what if I didn’t have what the professor was looking for in the three pages I turned in? I have to have every possible answer or thought in this paper and it has to be organized coherently, so ten pages it is! You can see how out of control my life became when I was taking fifteen credits and writing three times as much as I was supposed to.

3. It’s not OCD, but sometimes they go together.

I don’t have OCD, so I cannot speak on behalf of those who have that illness, but perfectionism and OCD aren’t the same thing. As I said before, my perfectionism isn’t about having a set number of ritualistic behavior patterns, such as turning my lights off and on three times before bed. Despite the correlation between compulsive behaviors, my perfectionism is very separate and independent of another serious disease.

But that doesn’t mean that the two don’t ever mix. I have a friend that has both OCD and perfectionism, and it’s not an easy situation for them. Just coming from my perspective, I can understand how tough perfectionism is, but I can’t imagine how emotionally and mentally taxing it must be to have both. But this friend does amazing work and does amazing things with their life. That’s the inspirational component of having this condition, if you can call it that. With this unwanted help, we create works of art that deserve the grades or praise we receive.

4. It doesn’t come naturally.

Just because we have a condition doesn’t mean that any of the work we do comes easy for us. My fall semester during junior year, I wrote 100 pages in three weeks. I was only assigned about half of what I wrote, but my compulsive “must-write-everything-down-or-I-fail” took over. I was taking 18 credits, and was also in the process of directing a play while I wrote all of this, and that semester I scored a 4.0. This is my proudest achievement as a student, but it came at a great cost. I almost dropped out of college the following semester.

I ended up dropping down to part time status and working on what I could manage, with a mere 7.5 credits. If I thought failing a class was hard, this was one of the hardest decisions I’ve made in college; and it was almost a fatal one. I may have managed to score a 3.75 that semester, but I almost committed suicide in the process. This condition isn’t easily navigable, and it most certainly doesn’t mean that hard work is easy.

I’ve learned throughout college that I am a smart person, but this absurd level of effort isn’t effortless. I pulled more all-nighters throughout my four years than anyone else that I know. It wasn’t a natural effort; it was painful, exhausting, and compulsive. I didn’t have a choice. If my work wasn’t perfect, I couldn’t settle with an unclear level of “good enough” and settle in for a night of sleep.

5. The pros do not outweigh the cons.

It might seem that everything looks good for me from the outside. But once you really get to know me, you can see that I am holding my life together with the threads of my sanity. I think my friends actually put it best when they gave me the “I’m holding my life together with duct tape” award. Those sleepless nights were only apparent to those I talked to about my work ethic. The amount of stress I was under was visible if you tried having a regular non-work oriented conversation with me. I couldn’t keep up with having a social life, sleep, and excellent grades. Most people say you can pick two of the three, but with perfectionism nagging me constantly, I could only pick one.

There are a lot of things I missed out on because of my perfectionism. I didn’t join as many clubs as I wanted to. I didn’t go out with friends as many times as I was invited. I didn’t have as much fun as some of my colleagues in my program. I don’t think I enjoyed learning as much as everyone else did. I missed out on some of the best stories and meeting some interesting people. I could have recovered from smaller failures before I failed student teaching. Or I could have learned from failure early enough that I wouldn’t have failed student teaching at all. I could have conquered my perfectionism earlier on. My life could have been so much different, but I couldn’t tear myself away from my work.

But there are a lot of doors opened for me because I worked as hard as I did. There are a lot of benefits and rewards for my efforts that I can’t complain about. I’ll be able to find a job. I know how I learn. I can explain a lot about my program, and my department was really proud of my accomplishments. I wasn’t as much of a failure as I could have been, especially if I let the abuse take control of my life. I didn’t do badly with everything, and I am aware of my shortcomings.

In the end, I don’t feel too badly for myself. I can’t. There are so many worse things that I could have experienced, and if this outcome is the worst case scenario, I’m thankful for my choices and life. It was a hard lesson to learn, but I’m glad I’ve made it this far. Through all the close calls, long nights, and heaving sobs, I am who I am because of my illness. I might try and change my perfectionist tendencies, but I’m happy to have experienced it all the same. And I hope that I’ve helped you understand more about what perfectionism is and what it means to have it. It’s not fun or easy, but hey.

That’s life.