Blogmas 2020 Day Four: Fickle Game

Are you a perfectionist?
Is it exhausting?

I spent my late teens and early 20s trying to make everything immaculate. That induced a crushing alarm to fail at doing so. When you're constantly trying to be vigilant to not commit even the slightest mistake, you lose out on acting for the work you've been fretting about being impeccable in the first place. And, that's the first step to stagnancy, inaction, and failure. 

Remember passing through landscapes as kids while travelling in the train? That's it; movement is requisite for change. And, when you're rendered indolent because of your innate dread of being sophistical, you lose out on doing anything at all. There's a pressing need to rewire the ideology we're taught to work with dramatically. Though, the only way to go about it is introspection. At the end of the day, all of us are well aware of what our potential is, and while some of us find ways very young to harness it, some take a couple of decades. But, it does come through. 

I was at a point last year, where I'd grown complacent with my situation. But, how I hadn't grown into it was happily. Not having that peace of mind was gravely taxing. I'd picked a race, I ran it for a few years when I realised I was only looking for another race. but the complacency held me back because by that point I knew how to perfectly run that race. And nothing felt more caging to me ever.

I needed to get comfortable with discomfort.
A friend once told me that I need to put myself out there. I need to be unguarded, and more than ready to make mistakes. At that point, it seemed a harsh enough advice, but I reckon he'd gauged something about me that I still hadn't - I learned best from making mistakes. More often than not, life isn't about knowing what to do, but what not to do. Like snakes and ladders; if you know what to avoid, you're good. 

I'd always, foolishly enough, paralleled perfection with success. It took me an entire season to realise that people get perfected as they succeed. And, you can't get success by being perfect. And God, wouldn't it be utterly boring to even conjecture such a life; if you always knew how to do everything right in the first go. 

Success to me now, means maturity, completion, liberty, hustling, regardless if you're ostensively attaining something, or not. The simple resourcefulness to create these likelihoods for yourself when you can do all that, everyday, itself to me is wizardly. It might sound opaque, but it's because mediocrity is the toughest quicksand to draw yourself out of, and create magic. Perfection to me now, is discipline, resilience, ambition, curiosity. A lot of times in life, the concept of perfect is urged onto us by others. Place some hard boundaries for that, and find and conjure your own definition of it. 

Be vulnerable with yourself, your mistakes. But at whatever pace you do, do it making sure you're moving ahead. Possibly, every closure, and denouement in the beginning will always be less than exemplary, but between your wins and losses, you will survive just enough.

More tomorrow. Until then.

Emmeline Meborn-Hubbard

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,
A.