Hello ______________ (Fill in Your Own Name in Your Head Here),
So I’ve always known I’m a perfectionist, but I think it was really only in this week that I saw how much of a paralyzing problem it can be. I almost didn’t want to go to class because I was so ashamed that I didn’t have a complete rough draft of my site content ready. I felt behind. Despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, I was encouraged by professors to still share what I have and not let that discourage me from coming to class. Suzanne, one my professors, encouraged me to embrace the unfinished, the partial, the not-quite-there yet and to still put my work out there. Her words, calling me to resist the urge toward perfection, have stuck with me ever since, and I hope they always will. In that moment when I read them, they struck a chord with me somewhere inside. “You’re not perfect, Fern, and you don’t have to be.” Wouldn’t life be so much better if I just took off those ridiculously-heavy shoulder-straps of perfectionism (that I have placed on myself btw)… and just took a breath, did what I could, and kept trying to better?
I don’t even know what more I could really ask of myself or anyone else.
It turned out that going to class this week was one of the best decisions ever. I got really good feedback on a lot things I was hung up over like my site name and how to arrange the content better, and it definitely wouldn’t have happened had Suzanne not uplifted me with her words and encouraged me to embrace myself and my work where I and it stood and to keep going. Thank you Suzanne and to people like her, from miserable perfectionists all around the world in need of taking off those shoulder-straps.
So all in all, some hard but necessary lessons learned this week. If I could just learn to inhabit the idea that I’m imperfect, flawed, and unfinished— and thus my work, reflecting me, will be that too, then I would really alleviate a lot of unnecessary stress in my life.
Until Next Time When I’ll Still Be Resisting Perfectionism,
Fern
