Still not perfect.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. – Voltaire

~~~

Well, hello there. I haven’t made a blog post in far too long, and I have no excuse.

Actually, that’s not true. I do have an excuse. I was procrastinating. And for the strangest of reasons: I was putting off writing a blog post because I really, really wanted to do it.

I’ve spent some time trying to figure out what that’s about — and to my surprise, it turns out to be connected with, yes, fear. I wasn’t too darn busy to get to it. I wasn’t enjoying the pleasure of delayed but inevitable gratification, the way I think happily in the morning about the delicious meal I plan to make that night. I wasn’t using making a blog post as a reward for completing a less enjoyable task. I wasn’t even grasping for ideas; I have half a dozen ideas stacked up and circling like airplanes over O’Hare in bad weather! I was just worried that I’d sit down and write something heartfelt, put it online, and realize nobody was interested.

In other words, I had an attack of perfectionism.

I think a little bit of perfectionism lurks in the heart of all of us. After all, who doesn’t want — even a tiny bit — to be instantly and effortlessly good at everything, and to universal acclaim? But sometimes that desire goes malignant and grows wild. When that happens, it can turn into the compulsive striving and monomaniacal focus of the stereotypical control freak. But it can also do just the opposite and flip into a vicious cycle of “why try?”

Here’s how it works:

I worry about being judged and found inadequate.
so
I think the only alternative to being inadequate is being perfect.
but
I know I can’t be perfect, even at the things I’m very good at indeed.
because
No one is perfect. Even Nobel laureates, Olympic medalists, and great diplomats have failures.
yet
I don’t find that comforting
because
I feel Nobel laureates et al have earned the right to flop sometimes, but I haven’t.
so
I procrastinate, because doing nothing seems safer than exposing myself to criticism for doing something imperfect.

Avoiding doing things because I can’t do them flawlessly is like a baby thinking, “If I can’t skip the awkward toddling bit and go straight to a graceful run, why should I bother trying to stand up at all?”

There’s only one medicine for the “why try?” disease: deliberately choosing to do something in a half-assed way, or at least what I think is half-assed, and see what happens. To my surprise, what I think is “nowhere near good enough” looks just fine to other people. The draft I pounded out in an hour rather than revising every sentence three times? It didn’t come back for revisions. The photos I shot on the fly, snapping five times as many as I ordinarily would have? I nailed a handful of shots I probably would have missed otherwise. The awkward conversation I didn’t allow myself to rehearse in my head for three days straight? I didn’t have to be as eloquent as I thought I did.

And that’s why I’m going to post this right now and not allow myself to go back and tweak it later.

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