I hate being a perfectionist!

The worse feeling in the world is getting a call or an email from your client saying that something was wrong with the work you just did for them. I take every call like that very personally, and I sit and worry that they will find more mistakes, or that my mistake has somehow led to extra work and embarrassment when my clients' clients find out about it. That's the bad part of being a perfectionist. It has done me no good being one either. It is a main cause of my panic disorder and is the reason why when I get home from work, I look at my work email to make sure there isn't any problems with something I just sent out. I wouldn't say I'm not confident in my work, I am for the most part, but mistakes sometimes shake my confidence and cause me to worry about stuff they may or may not have happened.

Everyone makes mistakes, and that includes the people I work for, but the feeling I have of somehow letting people down who depend on me to be right is something that is hard for me to shake. I guess the really scary part for me is that I wonder how/why I didn't catch the mistake in the first place. That's the part that always worries me. What if I've been doing that the whole time??, stuff like that goes through my head and breeds insanity constantly thinking about it. On a strange and related note, I had a dream last night where I'm at work and my office manager is doing some sort of calculation (something really simple) and I think it's wrong, so I do it my way. Then I see that in fact, I'm wrong, and I don't say a word, because I know that every single job I have every done was checked the same way, and it was wrong.
OCD and being a perfectionist is who I am, and something that even Zoloft can't change.