A Look Inside the Mind of an Obsessive Perfectionist

It’s Saturday. 

I have the entire day off and totally open. 

I’m exhausted. I worked four double shifts and taught three classes this week. I also managed to find the time to have lunch with three different friends, get a massage and have the tiniest bit of alone time with my Woman. This week I uploaded the fourth episode of my new podcast, bought a ticket to Thailand and paid off my tuition for the YTT I’m taking next month. I should be celebrating right? Well, my perfectionism wants to take all the joy away from me today. 

I’m an Aries. A fire sign. We’re known for being extremely self-centered, loud, stubborn and fiery. I believe that if you know the downsides of your zodiac sign, you can live with a little more self-awareness of your flaws and not be such a dick all the time. 

When you are a fire sign, it means you want to constantly take action. We literally cannot help it. The second something bothers me, I have to fix it immediately. I notice a weird charge on my debit card and I cannot do anything else until I’ve called the bank to dispute it. When I realize that I’ve made a mistake, I have to immediately take action to right my wrongs. I’m not very good at letting things simmer or putting things on the back burner. This is a quality I love about myself and hate about myself at the same time. 

If I want something, I get it. I get up and do it. Which is why I’ve been working my ass of these days trying to make all of my desires come true. 

And it’s fucking exhausting to be me sometimes.

(Said with absolutely no self-victimization implied).

I have a very hard time relaxing, winding down and stopping from my go go go. 

I’m frustrated that my body can’t handle working a double shift, producing a podcast and going to a Mysore class all in one day. I’m frustrated that there is only 24 hours in the day and that my body requires me to sleep for 8 of them. I’m frustrated that when I have a completely full day ahead of me, I still have to make time to eat food, drink water and meditate. It’s a fucking joke sometimes that these simple habits can seem like such tall orders to me.

So why the hell am I writing this blog? 

I’m not totally sure. Maybe I’m calling upon all fiery perfectionists. 

Maybe I want you to know that you are not alone. 

All summer long I’ve been feeling the most intense perfectionism settling into my body. That same perfectionism that lead me years ago to stop eating, work full time while in school full time, intern and study for the LSATS. This is the kind of shit I have to mindfully avoid, or I'll crash and burn. Not cute. 

So when I have an entire free day ahead of me, I wake up right at 8am with a laundry list of things I should do. 

“SHOULD” - that word. 

A word that us perfectionists really need to keep an ear out for. 

I should do this, I should do that. I try to catch myself when I start talking to myself that way. I try to shift that thinking into - “What do I really need to give myself in this moment?” 

I ask myself things like, “How would it feel to push laundry until tomorrow?” 

“How would it feel to do absolutely nothing productive with my day?” 

“How would it feel to pour an afternoon glass of whiskey, sit in the bathtub and watch a movie?” 

That feels good. 

So that’s exactly what I did today. 

I turned on the film Julie & Julia. A feel-good early millennium film about a young New York blogger who follows Julia Child’s recipes everyday for a year and writes about it. Can you imagine how much a simple sweet movie like this inspired me today? 

Something I love about this film is that she blogs every single day and her readers start to adore her truthful quirks. It reminds me of why I started blogging. I just wanted to share with the world the ridiculous things that go on in my head without processing my words through an editor and publisher. Which ultimately led me to starting a podcast. Which is a project that I’m totally in love with. 

But my first love will always be written word. The tap tap tap of my laptop. The way I lose myself in a trance as my thoughts become little pixels on the screen through the labor of my fingertips. 

I miss this so much. 

Honestly, these days it feels like my perfectionism is keeping me from writing. This feeling like I have to have some new evocative topic or mind-blowing revelation to share. This feeling that if what I have to say doesn’t impact others on a large level like some of my most-clicked blogs, that it is not worth it to write. It is this notion that if I am going to write something for all of you, it has to be PERFECT. 

Well I’m sorry but I don’t want to write for you all anymore. I want to write because I LOVE WRITING. I want to write because it is the only way I know how to work through anything. I fill journal after journal until my hand is aching and I still sometimes don’t feel like I got it all out. 

I’d like to take a page out of Elizabeth Gilbert’s book and write simply for the joy of writing. 

I put a lot of pressure on myself to be perfect. I have to be the perfect friend, the perfect lover, the perfect teacher, the perfect podcast producer (who fails willingly almost every week), the perfect Buddhist, the perfect student, the perfect Jane. And I’m losing my mind over here. I don’t want to be perfect. I don’t want to set those deadly expectations on myself. 

I just want to feel worthy of being loved even when I am not perfect. 

And today, I think I am starting to realize that I am worthy of being loved, especially when I am not perfect. That’s what people loved about Julia Childs. She just did the thing and didn’t give a fuck. I need a little bit more of that in my life. 

So I’d like to make a vow now, to take a little bit of time out of every week just like I used to, to sit down and write on my blog just for the sake of writing. To make Elizabeth Gilbert proud. To make Julia Childs proud. To make ME proud of spending time doing what I love the most.

No editing, no re-reading, no sitting on this story for weeks. Just write, finish and hit publish. 

Any of my readers still following me out there? 

Drop me a note. 

xoxo, Jane