Sunday, September 24, 2006

Perfectionism

I’m sorry I had to miss the Red Hat Stampers annual weekend this year. If I hadn’t been heading off to Cape Cod in a week, I would have gone for sure. There’s something really inspiring about spending time up north doing art with your friends. I hope they’re all enjoying themselves for me.
As it is, I have to work every day all day in order to get everything done before I go. But last night I had a mental meltdown while working on an article at two in the morning. I just could not think. It was like all the circuits in my brain were fried.
Part of the problem is that I’ve hit a wall with my book. While I know I’ll have a lot of rewriting to do when I finish, there’s nothing worse than trying to rework something that didn’t get done properly in the first place.
The section I’m struggling with is perfectionism. I’ve been working on it for the last couple of weeks, and now I’m behind on my book. When David asked me how things were going this morning and I told him that I was having problems with perfectionism, he burst out laughing. I know people think I’m a perfectionist, but in all fairness to myself, I get a lot done for someone who’s continually hung up on doing things right.

Anyway, I’m finding this a difficult subject to write about. On the one hand, I think perfectionistic tendencies are good because you want to take something as far as it can go. On the other hand, when you think you should do things perfectly, it destroys your spontaneity and makes it difficult to work. Now that I think of it, that’s really what I’m trying to say, so maybe I will be able to finish this section after all.

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