On Perfectionism

These days, one of the most important things I am working to internalize is: I no longer care about perfection. 

Y’all.

This one is so hard for me. To be perfectly honest, my truth on perfectionism fluctuates. I have so many habits that come with “work” that I am processing my way through and still sorting out. 

When it comes to my work, I still regularly question if I have put out a good work product if I haven’t developed anxiety over it. There’s always been almost an emotional cost to the work I put forth; I associate quality with “perfect,” and even if I’ve produced something that is good enough for its purpose, I still feel like it could have been done better. I often feel like the only quality work product is one that is as close to perfect as I could manage, given the inevitable constraints on my time and energy.

For my creative projects, which are rarely as driven by external time pressure, I constantly refine and polish, sometimes in an effort to procrastinate or as a way to mitigate my own fears of sharing. Real talk, none of these blogposts are as well-polished as I think they “should” be, but if I waited until they were, I would never post anything. I won’t even let myself go back and fix typos in old posts, not because I want to sacrifice readability, but because it is my tiny way of reminding myself that I can still get my point across even when my writing is imperfect. (Sorry for the comma splices, fam.)

Perfectionism has been so deeply ingrained into me for so long. Many times, I wake up in the morning (usually later than I intended to; let’s be real) already feeling guilty for not starting off the day how I wanted to. The thing that I call my “should list” activates, and my whole day then becomes a litany of “I should do this” and “I should do that,” until even the pleasure of accomplishing a task on my to-do list is diminished because I didn’t do the things in the way I wanted to do them, or when. I have to take a moment to consciously set aside my “should list,” identify my true priorities for the day, and let the disappointment in myself fall where it may.

I was reading some blogs on perfectionism the other day and one of the groundbreaking lessons I absorbed was that it is possible to motivate yourself without being hard on yourself. It is entirely possible to motivate oneself with love, compassion, and kindness. I have just been so used to negative self-motivation techniques, placing so much harsh pressure on myself, and demanding more and more of myself because if I’m honest, I really like the results. I worry otherwise that I won’t get as much done and I fear living below my potential.

But when I take that pressure off of myself, I truly notice the lack of its weight. I think it will take me awhile to feel free in the absence of the pressure I usually place on myself in an effort to produce more, to be more, to do more. But inherent in that letting go process is the birth of a new affirmation, an affirmation to myself that I am not defined by what I produce. I’ve phrased it as “I am more than the sum of the things I create.” Slow progress towards my goals is still progress – wasn’t that the whole moral of the story of the tortoise and the hare? #thanksAesop

These days, I’m working on building a new reality for myself. As I disinvest in these stories I’ve told myself around perfectionism for so long, I am working on learning to motivate myself with love, not fear. I am exploring what it looks like to extend myself the same trust that I extend to others who have earned it. And I am constantly reaffirming to myself that my worth is not found in my work, no matter how much life alignment I desire between my work and my purpose. The two are closely linked, but they are not one and the same.

I’m almost inspired by how I have lived for so long. If where I am now is at least in part the direct product of self-motivation based on fears, where can I go when I am truly motivated by self-love? genuine curiosity? full permission to let myself shine? As the Good Book says, only “perfect love drives out all fear” (1 John 4:18). I’m still recovering from perfectionism, but I’m excited to one day know freedom and to see where motivation by self-love can take me.