😣 Perfectionism is Exhausting

This post is part of Annie's WeblogPoMoAMA challenge for November! Question: If you could change one internal pattern/thing about yourself, what would it be?

I've developed a healthy (read: probably endless) number of neuroses throughout my life. In fact, it's likely these things that most people find annoying, off-putting, etc about me. But! If I could change just one of these things, it would be my constant need to be a perfectionist.

Ever since I was young, everything single thing I did, drew, or made had to be done perfectly and without error.

If I was coloring something and went outside the lines, the picture went to the trashcan and I had to start over. If I was taking notes in a class with a pen and made a mistake, I had to scrap the entire page and rewrite everything rather than have scribbles on the page. If I was drawing a still-life and needed to erase something, I'd start the entire drawing over rather than have eraser smudges on the paper.

And then I started writing stories.

Now, writing is where my perfectionism just LOVES to rear its ugly head. It's always taken me twice as long as it probably should to write anything -- essays, poems, academic papers, short stories -- because of the little voice in my head that enjoys torturing me.

"You can always make it better," it says over and over again.

Something I'm working on can be great by any standards, but that little voice believes there's always something to improve. I tend to agree, as I've always been a believer in the idea that we can all improve ourselves, but there needs to be a stopping point, you know? And this little voice doesn't have one of those.

I try to constantly remind myself that nothing is perfect. Nothing. But rather than having to do this dozens of times every day, I'd love it if I could just trade in this perfectionism for something else or do away with it all together. It's such an exhausting thing to deal with and I wish there were a way to get over it.