Playing Scared (18 page)

Criticism was the vitamin C of Perfectionism. “Many cures were attributed to this treatment,” recounted Pierrepont Noyes, son of the founder, in his extraordinarily odd memoir describing everyday life among the Perfectionists. “It is even claimed that criticism and cracked ice ended an epidemic of diphtheria after all other remedies had failed.”
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In 1879, the elder Noyes fled to Canada to escape sex crime charges, and the community’s couples soon broke off into monogamous pairs. The utopia was finished when the remaining Perfectionists split their collective wealth and regrouped as a silverware company.

Ballet, classical music, gymnastics, and equestrianism are disciplines whose demands appear tailor-made for perfectionists. They exact years of training, practice, and blistering self-evaluation—the very principles that perfectionists live by. No one can attain mastery in any discipline without a relentless drive for excellence. But the line between excellence and perfection is a thin one, and a body of research shows that it’s the people most preoccupied with perfection who are most vulnerable in performance. Canadian psychologists Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett point to “a perfectionism paradox” that requires athletes to achieve perfect performances even as the traits of a perfectionist personality subvert the very act of performance. Because, as John Orlando can tell you, there are two audiences at every performance. The first audience is external, the other is internal. They may witness the same event, but they don’t hear the same music, watch the same play, take in the same speech, or follow the same sporting event. For the perfectionist, the internal audience is the one that terrifies. It is ruthless and unforgiving, seizing upon every misstep, punishing the performer for every error, repudiating an entire performance for a blemish that no one else has registered. The accomplishments pale next to the failures. As with Caesar, the good is interred with the bones.

Hewitt and Flett argue that
nothing
good can ever come of perfectionism, which they define as a neurosis, implicated in depression, eating disorders, even suicide. They illustrate their argument with the story of “Mr. C.,” a fifty-year-old writer whose life unraveled after he discovered a single error in one of his published works. He was a lifetime perfectionist who
regarded himself as never being “quite good enough in any of his pursuits.” After he discovered his mistake, his confidence declined, his writing grew disorganized, his career faltered, and he was fired from his job. Always a loner, he distanced himself from others more than ever. Unable to bring himself to inform his wife that he had lost his job, he began drinking heavily and finally tried to kill himself. Later coaxed into counseling, he brought along a copy of his résumé so that the therapist could “get to know him quickly.”
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“Mr. C.” brings to mind the French celebrity chef Bernard Loiseau, who in 2003 shot himself in the head when he learned he was about to lose his perfect three-star Michelin rating. An official from the guide had recently paid a visit to Loiseau’s famous restaurant, La Côte d’Or, to express concerns about its irregularity and “lack of soul.” As Loiseau—a manic-depressive who at the time of his suicide faced a mountain of debt—once said,
“C’est jamais gagné.”
The battle’s never won.

The perfectionist equates a perfect performance with self-worth, an impaired performance with worthlessness. This love-hate is at the crux of Jennifer Sey’s memoir,
Chalked Up
. The 1986 National Gymnastics Champion, Sey was one of the sport’s golden girls—that is, until she wrote her blistering exposé detailing the years of withering criticism and twice daily weigh-ins required to reach her goals. She acknowledged that she was born with a competitive streak and a “near manic ambition” that gave her a willingness to endure punishing hard work, a diet of fruit and laxatives, and a host of injuries, including the breaking of her femur, the largest, strongest bone in the human body. But she also laid blame
on an overzealous mother (who threatened to boycott her high school graduation if Sey quit gymnastics) and the trainers at her win-at-any-cost gymnastics club in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “I can see the fat on you!” one trainer berated her. “Can you see yourself? After all this. All we’ve done. You’re gonna give it all away. You’re nothing!”
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Research on dancers, gymnasts, figure skaters, and high divers links perfectionism to high rates of injuries. “Most of the injuries, far and away, are overuse injuries,” says Bonnie Robson, a Toronto psychiatrist who has worked with Canada’s National Ballet School and other dance companies throughout North America. “You know that old joke? How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. Well, doctors will tell you that the way to ruin your career is practice, practice, practice.” Robson’s research has found that 47 percent of dance students suffer a chronic injury by the time they reach high school.
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Among professional dancers, that figure hovers at 66 percent.

The perfectionism common among dancers has long been attributed to a tradition of harsh teaching styles. Early training, a desire to prove oneself, and a focus on the teacher’s approval create a confluence of negative effects. Now, at least, the culture of secrecy is changing, according to Robson, who’s a specialist in performing arts medicine. “Before, when it came to anxiety or even injury—you would whisper, ‘Oh, so-and-so is injured.’ And the implication was that the injury was her fault. Her technique wasn’t correct; she didn’t have strong technique. No wonder. When the fact was that she was probably injured because her teacher was driving her on. But if you asked the teachers, they’d say, ‘Oh no, my dancers don’t have injuries.”’

In one study of perfectionism in sports, athletes who scored high in “concern over mistakes” reported that images of their mistakes ruled their thoughts during competitions; the study implicated poor attention and increased stress levels. Another study looked at the high incidence of hip injuries in young dancers and gymnasts. It pointed to stress and perfectionism as causation and suggested “an overemphasis on ‘concern for mistakes”’ by teachers and coaches.
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Additional studies have found a direct link between perfectionism and injury—specifically focal dystonia—among classical musicians, who are expected to adhere strictly to the written score and never to make a mistake. Focal dystonia is a neurological condition that can affect the hands of pianists and string players, causing the fingers to curl—hence the nickname “pianist’s cramp.” A 2005 study in Germany predicted that one in every one hundred musicians will develop the condition, which also cramps the embouchures of wind and brass players. Almost all of them will be men who suffer from anxiety disorders and perfectionistic thinking.

Leon Fleisher, Gary Graffman, and Glenn Gould are among the best-known pianists who have been affected by focal dystonia, and it is now thought to be the problem that ended Robert Schumann’s concertizing aspirations. The Romantic composer was a legendary neurotic; as a young man, he blushed and stammered while reciting his poetry to friends, developed unrequited crushes on young men and women alike, and suffered a terror of rejection. He was a born pianist, but after his father died he agreed to enroll in law school to placate his pragmatic mother. There, instead of attending classes, he practiced the piano up to seven hours a day. Perhaps that’s where his
physical setbacks began. He was twenty-one when the middle finger of his right hand, the
digitus obscenus
, went numb. He tried various self-help cures, including the use of a homemade chiroplast, a fiendish finger-stretching device popular with music students of the nineteenth century. In his diaries, Schumann referred to it as his cigar box. He rigged up a sling that was attached to the piano to hold his immobile finger aloft while allowing the other fingers to play away. These efforts did more damage than good, and soon he was turning to even more extreme remedies, such as electric shocks and animal baths. The latter involved slaughtering a live animal (a calf, pig, or lamb), into whose hot entrails Schumann would plunge his afflicted finger. It was a common cure of the age; the intestinal blood and feces were thought to have healing powers.

Throughout these self-ministrations, his future wife, the young Clara Wieck, was off touring Europe with her father (who also happened to be Schumann’s piano teacher). It was her first major concert tour, the one that would begin her ascent as the most famous pianist of the age. One can imagine the obsessive practicing that Schumann—in love with the virtuoso daughter of his teacher—entered into as he prepared for the Wiecks’ homecoming party. He was expected to perform his
Papillons
, a suite he’d composed in 1831, for the returning heroes, but by now his fingers—the problem appears to have spread—were almost paralyzed. So one can also imagine the relief Schumann might have allowed himself to feel. Now, at least, he had an excuse not to compete against Clara for piano primacy—a good thing, too, as he surely would have lost.

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Nancy Shainberg Colier is a New York psychotherapist who has treated dozens of actors, dancers, singers, musicians, athletes, and writers for stage fright. In almost all cases, she found that their fear was driven by a self-inflicted demand for perfection. Colier defined perfectionism as “a gilded cage, a trap,” and it was one she knew intimately. For as much as she deplored it, she questioned whether she would ever have become a top-ranked equestrian, competing on the national horse show circuit for twenty-five years, if she hadn’t been a perfectionist. She grew up in a family of New York intellectuals and spiritual seekers. Her father, David Shainberg, was a psychiatrist who with his friend and fellow seeker, the physicist David Bohm, traveled around the country making a series of films with the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. Her mother, Diane Shainberg, was a psychologist and Tibetan Buddhist nun whose writings helped pioneer the integration of Western psychological precepts and Eastern spiritual practices. Throughout the 1970s, the Shainbergs’ Manhattan brownstone was the setting for a series of spiritual “dialogue groups,” delving into the mysteries of the collective unconscious. The breakfast table was a place for dream interpretations, where children and adults were encouraged to remember and recount their nightly visions.

“There was a way that whatever you were doing belonged to the family,” recalled Colier. “You were expected to bring something to the table: ‘What have you got?’ That was the attitude. My parents were such big presences.

“So I found a place—horses—that could not have been more different from their world. The horses were an opportunity to be somebody growing up in this family. Riding and
winning became an opportunity for self-definition. And it was something that could bypass the mind, which I think I was looking for. The trainers were almost military, which appealed to me. It was really hard, there were no excuses, there were edges. In my family, in psychology, there’s something soupy. There’s nothing soupy about horses; there’s a toughness that really appealed to me.”

Colier is a slender, agile woman whose physique is of someone half her age but whose weathered complexion reflects a lifetime spent outdoors. Throughout her twenties, while working as a writer and producer in Manhattan for
Good Morning America
and
The Geraldo Rivera Show
, she drove out to Long Island every day before dawn, arriving at the stables at four
A.M.
to put in eight solid jumps before reporting to her
job back in the city. She thrived on the detail and precision of horsemanship—what it signified, for instance, when a horse shifts its weight a few pounds to the left as it canters to a jump. She worked with a trainer who could detect, as she rode past him at forty miles an hour, that her right thumb needed adjustment. If she would just tweak it by half a millimeter, no more, the horse would hold his head differently, his neck would relax, and she would take the jump more efficiently.

Nancy Shainberg Colier in 2001 equestrian exhibition
(Courtesy of Teresa Ramsay)

“You think about the hours,” Colier mused. “Ten thousand hours? That’s like the first month. When I see that number, I laugh.” She was referring to
Outliers: The Story of Success
, the popular book by Malcolm Gladwell, in which he repeatedly cited the ten-thousand-hour rule. The key to mastering any discipline, he wrote, was putting in roughly ten thousand hours of practice. One of his main examples was a study by psychologists of young violinists at the Berlin Academy of Music. While all of them had begun playing at about five years of age, their practice times began to diverge after a few years, so that by age twenty, the elite performers each had averaged more than ten thousand hours of practice. The merely “good” violinists logged in at about eight thousand.

Elite performers don’t just work harder, however. They focus better. And at some point, they fall in love with practice to the extent that they don’t want to do anything else. That’s what happened to Colier. “It’s that no-matter-whatness, that you can’t imagine life any other way. There is no better feeling in the world than to take a horse around for eight perfect jumps, to have a horse rise up into you and lift up its knees and drop its head and climb up almost like a spider into
you … It fills your body. It’s breathtaking, and when you finish that and everything gels, it’s the perfect storm. It can keep you fulfilled for months.”