Imperfect
I've been pretty quiet the last month. Mostly the reasons are mundane. I'm still recovering from surgery at the beginning of November. For most of the month I could barely handle a full day of work before succumbing to complete exhaustion. Twitter and Facebook fulfill quick communication needs that would have resulted in short blog entries. Pazi too, had surgery this week and she takes a higher priority than keeping my blog up to date.
When not working, running errands, or taking care of myself of my loved ones, I've spent much of my time in quiet reflection. I've been trying to work through a distressing conundrum as of late. That is, why have I been unable to create anything the last three years?
As I wrote in my November 11th post, so much of my life the last three years has been geared to the singular goal of having surgery. During that time, I've saved money obsessively, exercised most evenings, all while trying to build a career. It's easy to think that the cumulative stress is why my creative juices have gone dry. Therefore, it is logical to assume that once that stressor has been removed, things would just start back up again.
Just like an engine that's laid dormant for years, creativity rarely starts back up at the first turn of the key. Old, stale fluids need to be drained from the mental crankcase, and replaced with a fresh stock. Fittings and tubing need to be inspected and checked for ruptures. The battery -- having been starved feedback energy sieved from the internal combustive-creative process -- may need manual charging if not replacement. Even with all of that, you still may need to push the car down a hill just to get the ideas running again. Creative inertia, in other words, needs time to build up.
The problem for me is that each time I try to push that car down the hill, I seem to hit a brick wall before any motion is made. For the last year, I've tried to figure out just what in the hell is going on. I've written about it both online and off. Almost two and a half paper journals have been contributed to solving this conundrum. And despite all of that, I only seem to have progressed through a litany of bullshit notions that never get to the core of the issue.
First of all, I need to admit something that is probably blaringly obvious but no less embarrassing for it. I'm not what you would call a "normal" person. I've had childhood full of head-fuckery, followed by a decade of untreated depression. One of the liteny of traits I have as a result is Perfectionism. I've always prided myself on attention to detail and adhering to a high standard of quality in my work. It's no surprise that people have come to apply the label to me. Some may complain about perfectionism, but I saw it as admirable to work hard to create something exactly to one's vision.
You may be surprised to find, just as I was, that there are two forms of perfectionism. Adaptive Perfectionism can be the positive personality trait I described above. Maladaptive Perfectionism, however, can be a debilitating condition that eventually leads to cognitive paralysis. The following article from Psychology Today describes my current predicament fighteningly well. I've fallen into a neat little trap set years ago by a parent that's no longer alive today.
Whenever I sit down to draw, write a story, or even compose a blog post, I'm paralysed by fear. I'm terrified of making mistakes as I feel it reflects negatively on me as a person. It often feels as if a different set of rules applies to me, where mistakes aren't valuable learning experiences but personal failures. This isn't true of course, I'm merely playing out a unspoken script ingrained in me by someone that thought they were doing me a great benefit.
To get out of the trap is, well, tricky. The article I linked above, as well as others I've found around the 'net offer suggestions. Curiously, how I reguard projects at work may provide an inbuilt solution. Like everything in the commercial world, I am subject to deadlines. As a result, each project I take on I need to judge how long it would take to do it the "right way", vs. how much time I have available. This cost-benefit anaylsis often results in compromises. Deadlines, it seems, are my friends.
