Did you go off alone and cry in your room as a kid because you made the slightest mistake? Cry when you phrased something wrong? Your picture didn’t come out the way you imagined? Or maybe the clumsy phrases on the page read nothing like the words you had in your head?
Did your mind spin, reliving potentially embarrassing moments as a teen? Every rejection felt like a confirmation that you had to be perfect to be accepted. Maybe you were her. Maybe you are her now.
There’s the other end. If I can’t do it completely, perfectly, wholly, why bother?
It took years to admit I lived pulled between extremes. It’s called perfectionism, and it isn’t healthy.
Lately, my desire for life is to find the balance I need for peace. I need to meet myself in the middle.
I don’t need to exist on a restrictive diet. I need to get sleep, eat a balanced plate of food, move a little, and listen to what my body is telling me. Do I need more sleep? Do I need food? Do I need to push myself to clean one room in my house? Do I need a day of rest? Find the sweet spot between productive and rested. Yeah, I may not be thin like our culture idolizes, but that’s ok. This is the body God gave me, and I need to care for it.
I don’t need to do it all. I need to keep my job to pay my bills, eat food, and keep my house reasonably clean. It’s unrealistic to do all the things every day. There aren’t enough hours to teach all day, grade papers, clean my house, cook dinner, work out, write, do yard work, do laundry, hang out with friends, etc. I must pick what I can do and not beat myself up if something slides.
Sure, the strive for perfection can be helpful.
It can push us to be our best. I continue to push myself in my creative pursuits. I hope I never stop trying to be a more creative writer. I hope I never tire of learning new knitting techniques. But with both of those pursuits, I’ve found the middle. I can try new things and accept it may not work out. I can pull the working yarn until the fabric unravels and try again. I can revise over and over and delete whole paragraphs and know it’s not a waste. Maybe that’s because I’m embracing the middle a little more each day.
I hope you don’t have to wait so long to find the middle– But that’s probably the perfectionist in me wanting this journey to follow a timeline I think is better. Embrace the messy, beautiful journey of learning to be a better, more peaceful human.