Perfection is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality.
~ Augusten Burroughs
To the naked eye, I probably appear to be the furthest thing from a perfectionist. I’m not very tidy or overtly organised. I’m always a bit of a mess and slightly scatterbrained. My bedroom is constantly a miniature natural disaster of my belongings strewn across surfaces and piled together in apparent disarray.
When someone says the word “perfectionist” the typical Type A, Monica Gellers or Amy Santiagos come to mind. When I more likely come across similar to the Phoebe Buffays and Lorelai Gilmores of the world – rather quirky and apparently disorganised. In reality I feel like I’m often trapped in my brain with the same thoughts running through my mind on an endless loop. It all boils down to the same basic concept: “be the best or don’t bother trying”.
Read more: Confessions of a Closet-PerfectionistThis is upheld by an inner narrative of unrealistic expectations that have a large negative effect on my relationships with myself and with others. The unrealistic expectation of being able to write a novel with little to no preparation is eerily similar to expecting others to never make mistakes or be able to read my mind.
I’m sure this thought process, and the anxiety that comes with it, melded to my subconscious during my childhood thanks to multiple factors. I could waste time naming them all but it wouldn’t really serve a purpose here. The reason why I wanted to write about this today was to discuss my bad perfectionistic habits of feeling like a failure instead of a person who is tired and needed a break.
I was doing quite well with overcoming some of my negative thought patterns until the global pandemic which was quite traumatising for myself and literally everybody else. I just wanted to reassure myself (and possibly others) that it’s normal to fall back on negative coping mechanisms after grief and trauma. We get knocked into survival mode and our brains enjoy the familiar, even if they don’t always serve us.
So, as soon as the world went into lockdown, my little negative thought patterns started rearing their heads in many different ways. The germaphobic tendencies I already had were exacerbated by the mask mandates every other month. The lockdowns and social distancing caused my social anxiety to have a major flare-up. It was all-round not fun and I went backwards in a lot of areas. Survival-mode really kicked my butt and Perfectionism came to the rescue.
Nevertheless, the past three years did hold a lot of good as well. I spent a lot of quality time with my sister. My parents moved to Australia and I got to see them after 14 months. I got my Masters degree and two new jobs. It was a difficult time but I also managed to make new friends and stay in contact with old ones. I also read a lot (no seriously… a lot) of books. I made videos on the internet and started a bookclub. I attempted many 30 day yoga challenges (and completed a few of them). I started reading in Afrikaans and French. I became a permanent resident of Australia.
It was not all bad, and that’s important to remember, thanks to the stark influence of negative bias on the subconscious. Perfectionism is one of my coping mechanisms, and I have those because my brain and my body are only trying to protect themselves.
Over these past three years I have also realised how important it is to celebrate milestones and document memories. My scrapbooking skills got quite a lot of practice while I was at home and I think scrapbooking is a really great way to practice overcoming perfectionism. You find the beauty in torn pages and somehow layering mundane things on top of one another creates something beautiful. I also rekindled my love of photographing random every-day objects. I realised that compiling them into little monthly photo albums was really quite satisfying, even if nobody else understood their significance, I did.
My perfectionism has mostly impacted my writing, as has been the case for the majority of my life. This has always been the thing I have wanted the most, so this is also the area wherein I am the most self-critical, unfortunately. I had an extreme case of writers block and I am extremely grateful to these other avenues where I found a creative outlet when I needed it. But I do believe it is time to put my fingers back on the keys.
“Practice makes permanent, not perfect. If you practice the wrong thing, you make the wrong act permanent.”
~ Hamza Yusuf
When I tried googling the opposite of perfectionism I came across acceptance, pragmatism, and stoicism. All three much healthier thought processes and philosophies for life. This is my reminder for future me, a list of wonderfully cliché affirmations:
- Accept the things you cannot change.
- Doing something you love badly is better than not doing it at all.
- If you want to do something, just keep going. Even if you take one step every day, you will reach the finish line eventually.
- Our thoughts create our reality, so be less self-critical and more self-compassionate.
- If you want to do something just go for it. There will never be a right time, there is only right now.
- Taking breaks doesn’t mean you need to start over when you come back. Revise what you need to, and then keep going!
- Most importantly, be realistic and mindful with your spoons.
That last one might leave you scratching your head, but I have found the spoon theory particularly helpful in explaining social, physical, and mental exhaustion to friends and family this past year. For instance, teaching is a job where you have to be “on” and alert 90% of the time because you are in charge of engaging and supervising a lot of little lives. So when you come home or on the weekends you might very well be finished with all your social and mental spoonfuls of energy for the week. If you have a friend who probably works much longer hours than you but they spend 70% of their time at their own desk, they might find it difficult to relate to why you “never” want to hang out.
We all have different amounts of social, physical, and mental energy to start off with and we all have completely different agendas and need to budget and spend our spoons accordingly. This mindset has really allowed me to find more self-compassion when it comes to not wanting to write a blog post after report season has just finished; or saying no to what looks like a really fun brunch but I know I’ll need that energy for a full day of teaching on a Monday.
In short, have grace for yourself and others. We’re all doing our best and trying to be a little bit better every day. It also helps a lot when you have some qualitative data such as your good memories and achievements to look back on. If you get stuck on the quantitative data too much it can blind you to the rest. So sure, track your likes and follows, your word count and number of books read, but leave some space in your journal and your life for gratitude and memorable moments. It really does make a difference and helps creativity and joy nudge perfectionism out of the picture.
I hope you are all doing well, in the comments please let me know what has brought you joy recently.
Lots of love,
xoxo
