Perfectisim

The dangers of perfectionism as Elizabeth Gilbert sees it is that:

"too many woman seem to believe that they are not allowed to put themselves forward at all, until both they and their work is ready beyond criticism in puiste of perfection."

The writer Rebecca Solnit puts it well: " So many of us believe in perfectionism, which ruins everything else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good; it's also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun."

Elizabeth describes perfectionism "is just a high-end, haute couture version of fear." She thinks it's just fear "in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it's just terrified."

I believe that perfectionism isn't a fear in itself, but that the anxiety comes from not achieving a self prescribed level of perfection. I've struggled all my life to find a sense of self worth and the feeling of not been good enough has often been whispering to me from the wings. Perfectionism is an evil lure of woman, with society piling on extra pressure to achieve unrealistically high standards of oneself.

I have a deep fear of failure and often hold myself back if I don't think I will achieve something well enough. I'm my biggest critic and take criticism too much to heart. This decade I want to be more of a risk taker and I don't mean in the high adrenaline way (see my Go Ape post, that was enough excitement for me), but I don't want to stand back and let others succeed where I know I could have equated or surpassed them. I am sick of feeding this idea that to be successful I must be perfect, because the truth is, nothing is ever good enough for everyone and someone, somewhere will always be able to pick fault in it. All you really do is knit yourself a metaphoric straight jacket trying to twist and turn around everyone's conflicting opinions of what "perfect" is.

I want to have more belief in my own potential, like this quote (I've used before) by Anais Nin suggests it is often easier to follow this path in the end:

I fear the early buds of potential my headmaster saw as "flourishing" at 18, were killed by Art School's harsh and often personal criticism. Like a spring frost that make the young buds shrivel, retreat and die. It stopped my creativity in its tracks for the best part of a decade, because I didn't think I measured up.

It wasn't until I realised that I need to actively create or else my imagination would find good things in my life to destroy that I found the courage to set forth on my creative journey again. Having looked, I'm sure to an outside as if my blossom would never come again. I am hopefully that the plant that has reappeared from my roots in middle life will bloom long into late summer.