You’ve hit every mark you set for yourself, and it still doesn’t feel like enough. Some part of you already suspects the goalposts were never going to stop moving on their own.
Somewhere along the way, being good at things got fused with being worth something. That’s a bad deal, because it means every mistake isn’t just a mistake, it’s evidence. Competence is not the same as capacity, and perfectionism is what happens when you’ve spent years running on the first without ever building the second.
We separate what you do from what you’re worth, which sounds simple and is genuinely not. Perfectionism doesn’t respond well to being argued with directly, you can’t out-logic a standard that was never really about logic in the first place.
Individual work is usually where this starts, since perfectionism tends to hide in specifics: one relationship, one project, one standard you’ve never said out loud. Group work helps once you realize you’re not the only high performer secretly convinced he’s a fraud.