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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The fear of joy

Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame. – Erica Jong

~~~

In my last post, I talked about using fear as a tool for growth. But why is growth so scary in the first place? Growing requires us to change, and change is often the thing we fear most — even if we genuinely believe it will make us happier than we are today.

We can approach change in only three ways: chance, crisis, or choice. We drift along, realizing only after the fact how far we’ve come from where we began. Or we’re forced into the unfamiliar, kicking and screaming and clinging to what we’re used to with all our might. Or, least likely for the vast majority of us, we decide consciously to try something different, hoping and trusting that  our constricted horizons will expand.

For the uncommonly centered and enlightened souls who have complete faith that they can handle the outcome of any choice, good or bad, change is a delightful adventure. I can manage to summon up that kind of innocent daring, oh, once a year or so. The rest of the time, I (and probably the rest of us) find it a challenge, and not always one I want to take on. Let’s face it: changing by choice, as opposed to chance or crisis, can be terrifying. If we fall into change, we can at least blame circumstance if we don’t like the results; if we’re forced into it, we can say we cracked under pressure and made a bad decision. But if we make a conscious and deliberate shift in our lives, and we end up feeling worse off than when we started, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

By the same token, though, if we choose not to change, we’re resigning ourselves to “good enough,” to “it’ll do,” to “I can’t really expect any better,” to feeling like the victim of our fate rather than the master of it. Embracing change, walking straight into it with our eyes open, is the only way to control our lives, insofar as we have any control over them at all. We may hate the fact that change is life’s only constant, but we have to accept it. If we have to figure out how to build our wings on our way down, we have the option of selecting our moment to jump off the cliff rather than waiting for random fate to push us.

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The joy of fear

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. … You must do the thing you think you cannot do. – Eleanor Roosevelt

***

This quote is a touchstone for me; my main intention in starting this blog was to chronicle my attempts to follow Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice and thereby become a stronger, braver, more confident version of myself. I’ve mentioned this quote to dozens of people over the years, and almost every time, the person I’m talking to brings up a time that s/he “felt the fear and did it anyway.” This week, though, two very different people who have never met each other responded to the quote in a very different, and (to me, at least) unusual way: both said that they were so stubborn and determined that they couldn’t remember ever thinking anything was beyond them as long as they tried hard enough.

I have to admit that I found this completely incomprehensible. Never felt intimidated or overwhelmed? Never endured insecurity or self-doubt? Never suspected they’d bitten off more than they could chew? Never worried about what other people would think or how they might react? Never feared the repercussions of going against the crowd?  Never hesitated, even briefly, to say, “I wonder if this is going to work out”?

Never? Not even once?

That seems more than impossible to me; it seems superhuman.

But the flip side — being ruled by doubt — seems equally impossible. I confess that I’ve certainly  hung back, kept quiet, delayed, denied, avoided, procrastinated, made excuses, taken the path of least resistance, or simply gone along with the crowd from time to time. The axiom about how the nail that sticks up gets hammered down rings all too true for me some days. Let’s face it: it’s a lot easier, plain and simple, not to do the things you think you can’t do.

But it’s also not as satisfying.

There’s joy in looking fear in the face. In standing up for yourself. In defending someone else. In risking rejection. In entering competition. In challenging conventional wisdom. In claiming authority. In setting boundaries. In examining your preconceptions. In defying your prejudices. In redefining your priorities. In confronting your phobias. In speaking your mind, as activist Maggie Kuhn said, “even if your voice shakes.”

Fear — not terror, but a healthy concern for consequences — is part of the human condition. It’s normal to think you can’t do something. It’s also normal to go ahead and give it a shot anyhow.

This week, find something you didn’t think you could do, and then do it. And come back here and tell me about it.

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Surviving or thriving?

We’re either surviving or thriving in life. To survive indicates that we are operating under the assumption that life is dangerous, that it’s set up for us not to get what we want, that others are out to get us and that, if we stopped manipulating and cajoling, we would soon go under. To thrive means that we have chosen a new foundation. We’ve stepped into an awareness that the possibilities for love in our lives are unlimited, that abundance is ours for the asking, that what we have to bring to the table is very much welcomed, and that, if we just open ourselves up and start trusting both ourselves and others more, goodness and love will flow toward us always. - Katherine Woodward Thomas

***

I first found this quote a few years ago, just as I was coming to the painful realization that I had once again allowed myself to get involved in a relationship with a built-in expiration date which had been clearly stamped on the package when I opened it. In that particular case, I’d recently ended a long-distance relationship, and I’d sworn to myself I wouldn’t do that ever again. Except that, well, there I was looking at plane fares to go see someone who lived even farther away. Wait, what?

You’d think I’d have learned from that. Hell, I thought I had learned from that. But I kept finding myself saying, “I will not date someone who is/has/does [trait X]; that is a bottom-line issue,” and then turning around and, you guessed it, falling head over heels for someone who had that very dealbreaker trait. Wait, whaaat?

And I’ve done that in my professional life, too. I’ve sworn up one side and down the other that I was dropping a difficult client or refusing to lower my (extremely reasonable) rates or pursuing a really desirable project — and then let the difficult client know I was available because having room in my schedule made me nervous, or  lowball an estimate for a project because I figured any money was better than none, or let an opportunity slip by because I just didn’t know how I’d make time for something, and besides, I was probably competing with half a dozen other people with better qualifications, so why bother. Ummmmm…

In short, I’ve been damn good at ignoring my own needs, values, and convictions. Worse yet, I’ve tried to convince myself that I was perfectly happy that way. That all I really needed was the low-hanging fruit. That I could learn to be content in a situation that I already knew was never going to give me what I wanted. That I should settle for what I could get, because you can’t snuggle with — or pay rent with — a need or value or conviction.

Now, for comparison: this weekend, I bought five pounds of exquisite heirloom tomatoes at the farmers’ market. As I type this, I’m eating one, sliced up with a little salt and olive oil and balsamic vinegar. It is the best thing ever. And you know what? When it’s not tomato season, I don’t buy tomatoes. I find other delicious things to eat.

And I finally get that that’s the difference. Merely surviving is like buying a sad tasteless supermarket tomato and trying to persuade yourself that it’s succulent and flavorful — or, worse yet, trying to pretend that you actually like pink styrofoam — just because the Safeway is open 24 hours and it’s just a few blocks away. And by comparison, thriving is saying, you know, I’m going to go out and find the most beautiful, perfectly ripe Black Krim tomato I can, even if I have to wait until the weekend and go across town to the farmers’ market, because nothing else will do.

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