Last week, I noticed I accidentally left a space between the last word of a sentence and the period in my blog post. One post in and the perfectionism is already up and running, lol. (Side note–there have been many times I’ve wanted to put “lol” in my academic papers…words cannot describe the joy I feel right now.) The funny thing is, I’m sure there’s something more important that my brain could have latched onto as a “mistake” in my last post, but I kind of love that it was the extra space. Something easily fixable. I may leave it, though. For posterity. (I am well aware that phrase makes no sense here; I just love saying “for posterity.”)
I feel like most writers/creatives struggle with some version of perfectionism, and I think a lot of that comes from how we’re trained to judge things in society. In school, all of our writing/art/music is graded on a scale from 0-100. Movies are rated with percentages on Rotten Tomatoes. Songs are ranked on Spotify. Books are rated out of five stars on Goodreads (and there are no half star options)! Everything has a number nowadays, and I think that this “easy” rating system is hard to escape. So, writers such as I end up spending days staring at that vertical blinking line on a blank Google Doc, almost begging it to “do something, please.”
A while back, I saw this Reddit post on a writing subreddit discussing editing as you go/making the first draft perfect vs. writing “poorly” and editing later. I think most people do a combination of both, depending on what they’re writing. As I was thinking about it though, I’ve realized that I love writing “poorly” for my first drafts. I love placeholder names, saying “insert correct word here,” word vomiting…all of it. Even as I write this post, my paragraphs are filled with highlights and brackets and things to come back to. The truth is, I’m going to end up editing what I think is “good writing” anyway, so I might as well work on the bigger story first and the small things (like, say, extra spaces) later.
But thinking about all of this has made me realize how much of it I can apply to “real life.” I’ve always hesitated to do things that I didn’t think I could be “good” at or get praise for. I procrastinated on my pre-calc homework in high school, not because I didn’t want to do it, but because I was going to get the questions wrong anyway, so why even bother? I had an art class my freshman year of high school that I switched to a piano class after the first semester because I was “better” at piano. I don’t sing along to songs because I don’t like my singing voice.
To some degree, I think I even chose to be an English major because I knew that’s what I was “good” at, and it seemed like that’s what everyone else did, too. The music majors were good at music; the math majors were good at math; the Biblical Studies majors memorized whole books of the Bible (small Christian college, remember?). Over the course of three years, however, that choice became more than just about whether or not I was a “good” writer. Specifically, there was one semester of my senior year where there was a unit on poetry, and I had to come to terms with the fact that this was not going to be something I was naturally “good” at. (I’m a rambly writer, and I love my filler words…the poets do not appreciate this.)
Since then, and this past year specifically, I’ve realized it really does not matter whether or not I or someone else thinks I’m “good” at something. I’ve started doing things because I enjoy doing them. Just a few minutes ago, as I was writing this, I took a brief pause and realized how much I love the writing process. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle–the fun part is putting it together. (At least, that’s what I’ve heard; I actually loathe jigsaw puzzles.)
Two weeks ago, I bought a set of three canvases from Five Below. I am going to paint something on them and hang them above my bed. Do I think it’s going to turn out well? No! I’ve already messed up multiple times and am shooting for mediocre at this point. But I love painting, even if I’m horrible at it and can’t visualize things in my head.
This morning, I made a salad, and I cut the cucumbers unevenly and sprayed tomato water everywhere and had to text my mom every five minutes because I was scared of messing up hard-boiled eggs. But it was fun, and it was the best salad I’ve ever had because I was the one who made it (and also it was just genuinely an S-tier salad with all the toppings).
Obviously, I’m still working on all of this perfectionism stuff. When I was setting up this website, I spent like three hours trying to figure out how to add a “like” button to these posts. Gotta love external validation.
So why am I writing this? I have no idea. Originally, this post was going to be about perfectionism and encouragement to do all the things we’re “bad” at (and I think we eventually got there), but it’s sort of also ended up being some kind of self-therapy thing. I guess I’ll leave with this: we’re 10 days into the new year. It’s already (definitely) not a perfect year. But that’s ok. We’re still on the first draft. And while this isn’t like writing, and we can’t go back and “edit” the past, we can definitely still edit how we will respond in the future. 2026, like every other year, will be a year of mistakes and learning from those mistakes, and that’s perfectly ok.
P.S. anyone who finds the extra space in my previous post gets 5 extra credit points
P.P.S. I have now added a “subscribe” button…do with that what you will