A few weeks back, as I eased out of a week or so of being a blob on the couch, I wrote up a plan. It wasn’t a strict plan, more a guide of what I wanted to be sure to accomplish each day to avoid a return to blobness: Exercise, get outside for a walk, write.
That’s all. I felt afterwards I should have added “study Japanese” to the list, but it probably doesn’t matter that I didn’t, because I didn’t manage to stick to the plan for a single day. I managed to mostly keep my kids to their plan (get outside [mostly playing in the yard], homework [for the eight-year-old], art/music), but I seemed incapable of doing it all, even if “all” didn’t feel like all that much.
I didn’t write at all. In fact, I haven’t written in over a week is my guess. I bombed out of Camp NaNoWriMo in brilliant fashion, signing into the site just twice in April; jobs I thought would be coming in haven’t come in; and every idea I had for this blog got rethought and shot down before I even opened my laptop.
I wanted this blog to be a place to write anything and everything, from silly to serious, ridiculous to, well, everything else. But I’ve hit the perfection wall. Again. I hate the perfection wall. It does absolutely nothing for me, except protect my ever-so-delicate sense of worth.
That’s nice, yeah, but mostly it just keeps me from trying new things. From getting things done. I hate, hate, hate having people see a work-in-progress. And after handing in a final draft, I agonize over mistakes or typos or mistaken facts that even though I’m pretty sure aren’t there, I worry might actually be there. What if, what if, what if??
So what to do? I could try to climb over the wall, just go for it and say “screw you, wall of perfection” as I vault over the top. But alas, on top of this wall of perfection are pride-protection spikes. Very long and pointy ones. Tipped with poison. Thallium, maybe. (← Due South reference) Maybe even some embarrassment-avoiding barbed wire, too.
Imagine I wrote something that some people thought was stupid! A waste of time! As in, “reading that blog post took three minutes of my life that I’m never getting back.” God forbid I embarrass myself or let anyone down.
But—that’s pretty lame. My brain and heart both know that that isn’t the right way to live a life. I also know that’s not the example I want to set for my kids.
So let’s try again. From tomorrow.* Weirdness. Experiments. Stuff that might make you think “I can’t believe I just spent two minutes of my actual life reading that.” (Hopefully not, though.) Let’s all be a bit more creative tomorrow, even if we were plenty creative today.
*”Tomorrow” in coronavirus time is anywhere from actual tomorrow to sometime next week. Ish.
Kamakura Dreamin' 