My Madness

My madness isn’t constant. At least I don’t think it is. It’s episodic. Its root cause is my compulsiveness.

I’m afflicted with a gift for seeing straight lines. This means that when I have work done in my house, I see if it’s out of square. I notice the change in luster if the paint is too thin. My feet feel a floor out of level or a piece of limestone that is a bit too high on one side. I’m forever hovering over workers, to their and my dismay. I know I should probably stay out of their hair until they finish, and then check, but it always seems easier to try to get it right the first time.

I don’t do this with doctors. If a surgeon is well trained, has a brilliant reputation in their field, and is recommended by someone I trust (usually another doctor), I listen to what they plan to do, ask a few questions to be sure I understand what’s being recommended and why, and then I let them do their job. I don’t google my problem and quiz them based on what I read on the internet.

In fact, I spend more time scouring online reviews of cheap electronics. 

When I was a lawyer, I worked on big mergers and financings. My firm was new to some of the more exotic financing approaches, so I spent a long time learning the craft. It was like looking for straight lines and level floors on every page of the documents. It was tedious and a little terrifying…and exhausting. Eventually I realized that if we were going to do these deals over and over, we needed to standardize our forms and procedures. So we did that. The young lawyers working on the deals with me became experts. They did the work on hundreds of deals and only came to me with the problems. As we worked together and I saw their skill firsthand, I came to trust them. I didn’t have to hover over them. I knew they would do the job right.

I couldn’t have done it any other way. Certainly not as a practical matter. If I’d been involved in the details of every deal, I would have been a bottleneck. But also I would have driven myself crazy.

So that’s what I’ve learned about myself. If I’m to maintain my sanity, I have to let others do things for me and not stand over them while they do it. The trick is to make sure I have confidence in the people I’m relying on.

If I haven’t trained them myself, though, or know someone outstanding has, it’s hard for me to depend on others. To come back to where we started—home improvement—sometimes it can be so hard to find good people that I just hire and hope. After all, it’s only a window replacement or a drywall patch, not major surgery. 

But the lines have to be straight and the paint smooth. And if it’s up to me to make sure they are…well, let me just say this to all the workers I have held to my perfectionist standards over the years: I’m sorry, I can’t help myself.