“You should write a book,” people often tell me.
“Once I gain some self-discipline,” I say.
“Once I escape the stultifying grip of perfectionism” would be a more truthful response, but it sounds a bit dramatic.
All those new age self-help gurus online tell me, “Perfectionism is the fear of rejection and abandonment in disguise.”
They say, “You don’t actually want to be perfect; you want the safety that you think being perfect will bring you.”
And they’re right. It’s a simple formula. Perfectionism is rooted in shame. Shame is rooted in self-protection. Shame tells you to go into hiding to protect yourself.
Feeling frozen in perfectionism is your nervous system hitting the brakes when birthing your creativity into the light of day feels like a threat to your safety. If at a young age we learned that our safety and survival rest on relational acceptance, and that acceptance only comes with perfection, then imperfection means rejection, and rejection means you die. So you hide your imperfect self to survive. Your nervous system just wants to keep you alive, and it thinks that imperfection is going to get you killed.
It sounds a bit dramatic.
Whatever.
It’s just the truth.
I remember shamelessly opening a 40-page paper in college with the sentence: “I don’t want to write this because it won’t be perfect.”
That self-protective resistance still comes up each time I write.
My nervous system is not ready for a book!
I’ll write a blog instead.