(I’m)perfect

It’s time we expose perfectionism for what it is: a disease. A parasite. Sickness. Extremely annoying. Call it whatever strikes your fancy, just don’t try to write it off as a personality quirk or coyly call it your “weakness” in a job interview as some sort of humble brag.

Perfectionism rots us slowly from the inside out. It can start out innocently enough -- straighten a crooked picture frame, proofread your essay a fourth time so every comma is just so -- but even the flu that wiped out half the global population probably looked like the common cold at first.

All I’m saying is, perfectionism is paralyzing. If you don’t learn to control it, it will control you. Left unchecked, it will make your life more stagnant than a shit-filled Saharan watering hole in the dead of August. All I’m saying is, I don’t write, I don’t explore, I don’t do anything new, try anything, because I know I can’t be perfect. So I don’t. Do. Anything. What kind of life is that, living in perpetual fear of failure? What’s pitiful is, the hypothetical failure that has kept me rooted to the same place in my life for the last x amount of years isn’t even the most major, life-altering kind of failure. I’m afraid of the smallest, most inconsequential failures -- the kind of failures that a normal, sane person might call a speedbump, a learning curve, trial and error. The failure that I fear the most is the failure to be good at something as simple and subjective as writing. I don’t want to produce anything bad so instead I produce nothing. What a joke: the writer who doesn’t write.

My perfectionism is a sickness. Reckless abandon, in the form of unfiltered word vomit, unapologetic garbage, and purposely misplaced commas, is the cure.

What terrible mess will I allow myself to create without this senseless, needless fear?