The Dark Wizard of Perfection |
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Dean Potter, despite being a legendary figure in free soloing, struggled with envy and depression.
Dean epitomized perfectionism, which is an insatiable pursuit.
Dean's greatest rival was just a stand-in for an unattainable ideal.
The new HBO Max documentary series, The Dark Wizard, chronicles the adult life of the creative adventurer Dean Potter. In addressing his extreme personality, it addresses life’s extremes, extreme reactions, and extreme decisions. And it peers into the extreme emotions of its admirable subject. Dean was plagued by extreme highs and lows, experiencing frequent bouts of depression, which seemed to coincide, at least in part, with his failures.
Dean was obsessive and perfectionistic. Arguably, he had to be in his world since mistakes while free soloing tend to imply death. But his obsessiveness stretched beyond survival; as any other perfectionist, he needed to be the best. In his youth, his competitiveness served him, since there wasn’t much competition. He routinely shattered records, creating a legacy years before his passing, or so it seemed. As Alexander the Great did, Dean stood, figuratively and literally, on the mountaintop and wept, for Dean, at a stage in his life when he truly had no worlds left to conquer. As time went on, as he aged, a younger, faster, and more agile Alex Honnold, who once admired Dean, chased and broke each of Dean’s records. Alex even went on to........