Isn’t it exhausting trying to live up to the expectations we put on ourselves? The idea of getting something perfect, or even just “right,” has been stifling my progress with writing. The last blog post I posted took me a while to post because I wasn’t quite satisfied with how short it was. I felt like because it was not what I imagined, maybe I shouldn’t post it. But at the same time, wasn’t it the whole point of this blog? To do something that scared me and to improve my writing. Of course, I’m also writing in the hopes of helping and inspiring others who are looking to minimize or live their lives more intuitively. So that pops into my mind before I post something, if I’m writing this also to help others, don’t I owe it to whoever will read it to make it as good as possible?
The issue with trying to create your best work, is it will never be perfect. And I find this paralyzing at times. I can be a perfectionist, although most people would not guess that about me. In trying to create something perfect I end up procrastinating because I fear the inevitable failure when my work never lives up to what I’ve imagined in my mind. Though of course it isn’t failure, many times in my mind creating something less than ideal is labeled failure. I hear a voice in the back of my mind, maybe coming from a well-meaning teacher or authority figure from my childhood, saying, “If you’re not going to do it right, don’t even bother with it at all.” But how are we to improve if we don’t try at all? And isn’t there beauty in imperfection? I understand holding oneself to a higher standard, but we can only do so much when the paralysis and expectations are too much. At times when I feel overwhelmed, I like to tell myself to try to do just one thing on my to-do list. Let’s say the bathroom needs cleaning. Sometimes that task can feel so daunting to me because I picture all the little things involved with that and it adds up to so much work in my mind. So instead of cleaning the bathroom, I just ignore the task and procrastinate with something else. There’s another option though. I can just clean the mirror in the bathroom. Or sweep the floor or clean the toilet. No, the whole bathroom won’t be clean but one item in the bathroom being clean is better than nothing.
Striving for perfection cripples creativity too. When I’m writing down my thoughts and start to worry about grammar and sentence structure, I start forgetting why I even sat down to write in the first place. There’s also the fear that what I write won’t resonate with anyone or will annoy others. I remind myself in these moments that you can’t please everyone. I don’t love or even enjoy every book or article or blog post I’ve ever read and so it should be totally fine with me that others may not enjoy what I write. All they need to do is just not continue reading my blog. Publishing writing that I consider to not be my best work is somewhat liberating to me. I’m acknowledging to myself that there could be improvement in the writing itself, but there is improvement when I do something despite the fear of failing.
As I’m writing this I keep remembering my college years and how much procrastination affected my writing habits. I would sometimes wait until the day before a paper was due to write the whole thing. Sometimes this was due to poor time management and a result of all the other coursework that needed to be completed. But many other times my procrastinating was due to a fear of failure and perfectionism. I would worry so much about starting and how I would approach the assignment that I would avoid getting started at all. It got to a point where I thought I actually worked best under pressure. By waiting until the night before an assignment was due I would stay up as late as it took. I wrote many essays this way and the process never got less stressful. My eyes would dart towards the clock on my laptop every few minutes, hoping that time had somehow slowed as I furiously typed to allow me any sleep at all that night. The next day I would be exhausted but relieved that I was able to finish the assignment in the nick of time. I haven’t written much since those stressful, chaotic times. That’s not how I want the process of writing these blog posts to be. I want to enjoy the process of writing, especially because I’m writing about topics that interest me. This is a passion project, not a college final on a book I could barely get through without falling asleep.
Indecision. This is another problem with aiming for perfection and contributes to my procrastination. I get fixated on making the perfect or right decision. Unfortunately, life doesn’t usually work this way and there isn’t a perfect choice to be made. We can’t know exactly what will happen until after we’ve made the choice so we can only try our best with the information we have available to us at the time. I’m still working on being more decisive. Recently I’ve been trying to listen to my intuition more and trying to tune in to what feels best for me when I’m feeling healthy or in a good mood. Then, when I’m having a hard day or not in such a great mood, I find I can build on the intuition I’ve helped cultivate during happier moments.
Recently I reread one of my favorite books, East of Eden by John Steinbeck. In it, one of the characters says to another, “now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” This quote always resonates with me whenever I reread the book. I want to stive to be good, not perfect. If I mess up that’s okay. And if something isn’t good at all, that’s fine too. It’s just a stepping stone to improvement. I have to remind myself that doing what I can at one moment is better than doing nothing at all. Maybe next time I can do more. And that’s what improvement is for me, for the most part. Doing more than I thought I could do and using that momentum to keep the progress going. Imperfection is part of being human and in giving ourselves the grace to fail and forgive ourselves, we are also extending that to others. Be kinder to yourself today. Give yourself permission to do something half-assed. And if you are burdened by perfectionism like I am sometimes, I hope you can let go of those expectations to find you are worthy.