April’s Theme: Perfectionism

Perfectionism Is…

Perfectionism is a weight on my shoulders, a vice around my head, like some old sci-fi fi movie where they hook you up to some brain machine that fills your head with thoughts that aren’t really your own but as soon as they’re injected the neurons flip and they stick. Perfectionism is a constant stream of judgment: was that right? Good? Stupid? Usually stupid. A sinking chest, an acidic stomach. Do it better next time. And then those injected thoughts are off, planning how to do it better next time, orchestrating every move so that it can go perfectly, but forgetting, always forgetting, to factor in real life. The obstacles that real life throws that aren’t really obstacles except for the fact they stand between the injected thoughts and some scripted end goal, but if those thoughts weren’t so rigid then they wouldn’t define those obstacles as obstacles. They would see them as interesting parts of the journey, adventures. A puddle to step around—or through. A fallen tree to step or climb over, or if it’s especially large, to navigate around or chop through. Stopping to address the fallen tree does not mean I picked the wrong path or am doing the journey “wrong.” I am still moving forward and making progress, it just looks different than the scripted, imagined, expected path those injected thoughts dreamt up. The group is, that those injected thoughts to serve a purpose, they give me goals and direction and motivation. But—what if I would have those things from my own thoughts and not the injected thoughts? What would be true if my own thoughts didn’t try to turn off the injected ones, but could recognize them as foreign and simply be stronger? Brush them away like annoying gnats and continue chopping down that tree?