Perfectionism: The Secret Monster

Perfectionism. It's blessing and a curse.

Mostly a curse.

I am finding it slowly creeping into all the crevices of my life. It's perfectly painted finger nails digging into my brain and sending impulses to nit pick at everything.

I have discovered that my need for perfection is creating an obsession with contingency plans for all possible scenarios. Unfortunately, this makes me feel like I need to plan for everything that could go wrong before I can do anything at all.

I need to loosen up. I'm starting to feel like a real stick in the mud.

I especially can't handle when plans change and I didn't make any plans for it. 

Two words.

Worst. Nightmare.

My brain scrambles to reassess the new situation and go through the entire process that I had taken at least a week to think through before.

I can no longer register emotion on my face because my brain can only do so much at once. For the next 5-10 minutes I'm stuck with only responding in "okay"s and "no, yeah, I'm fine with that"s.

Lies.

I'm not fine with it.

I need notice!

Planning isn't the only area of my life that perfection's perfect teeth have smiled over.

School has also felt the effects. 

You may be thinking, "School? Well isn't perfectionism good to have when in school and trying to do well?" Not really. In fact, it makes doing well an ultimatum. 

Either I do it perfectly, or not at all. 

Very quickly perfectionism turns into the looming monster of procrastination.

Of course my brain reasons that if I save something for the last second then my only option is to finish it without obsessing over it being perfect. Then, ultimately, it saves time.

Unfortunately it doesn't save stress. I got stress to spare because of how close I cut it to my deadlines. 

Perfectionism has put me under so much stress that my trust in other people is tainted too; in a "no offense but I've thought about this much more than you" sort of way. 

So here it is. My confession. 

"Hi, my name is Joy, and I'm addicted to perfection." But 2018 is my year, and I'm going cold turkey...

Okay so probably not cold turkey, but I want to learn how to roll with the punches, submit assignments in a timely manner without obsessing, and trust other people to make decisions without questioning them.

Is that so much to ask? 

By the way, as my first act of non-perfectionism, I'm submitting this post without re-reading it over three times. Look at me go!