Yesterday, somewhere in my neighborhood, someone was playing/practicing marching band style drums.. It was kinda fabulous. Outside for all to hear, no hiding away in a bedroom with the windows shut.
I wish more of us practiced in public.
Perfectionism is sorta like a cancer of the soul: if left unchecked it grows, metastasizes overtaking everything. Killing off our creativity, our spontaneity, our joy. And please remember that I have actual cancer. I am well aware of the horrors. I use this analogy with intention.
I’ve spent too many precious years afraid of “looking foolish,” terrified of failure.
But what do I have to show for all that caution?
Notebooks full of unfinished essays and poems, friends unmade for fear of being rejected, dreams unchased for fear of not being good enough (what does good enough even mean in this modern hellscape of disposable human beings?!?)…
And all that caution never, not once, brought me an ounce of joy.
Something I’m noticing about myself as I enter my second year post cancer diagnosis is I’m feeling calmer, more grounded in my re-emerging self. I’m embracing what lights me up more than ever before because why the fuck not?
What-even have I been waiting for all these years?
The narcissistic mother whose resented me since birth? She was never going to find me palatable, much less lovable anyway. Can a narcissist even actually love anyway? I doubt it.
The people who rejected me for being too weird, too childlike, too gentle? I’m grateful they did now though. What if I’d lost even more of myself trying to stay acceptable for people so petty and cruel?
And those first two husbands who practiced a myriad of ways to dehumanize and break a woman’s spirit? Fuck those guys, they never deserved my soft, gentle and far too loyal heart.
Also, fuck my 4th grade art teacher for mocking me because I couldn’t trace!
That was so fucking cruel. It crushed 4th grade me. So much so that I spent decades believing drawing-painting-collaging-etc was off limits to me because I wasn’t good at art.
I mean, seriously, who mocks a child for, well, being a child?!?
I think that right there sums up how so many of us end up battling perfectionism as adults: being mocked-betrayed-rejected-abandoned as children for not being fucking perfect.
It makes me sad.
No little human deserves that. Far, far too many spend our childhoods trying not to drown under it.
Maybe I’ll get lucky and get to listen to more marching band drummer practice today.
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