You're the dream you have not finished dreaming

That clenched, fawning, and unassertive personality that I've leaned on to ensure love, protection, and positive perception is not, in fact, me.

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I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not,
how shall I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?

— Mary Oliver, from “I Worried”, Devotions

☆

“Perfectionism,” as I experience it, is the desire for a complete removal of any chance that I may behave, act, or speak in a way that attracts or evokes culpability, being disliked (feeling ostracized…, “unwanted,” “unloved,” “not good,” “irredeemably flawed,” “undeserving,” “bad,” “wrong,” “ugly.”) Perfectionism makes everything shallow and flat: sex, love, writing, cooking, art, conversation, interaction. Perfectionism creates an inward panic that nullifies intuition, kills spontaneity, robs us of our capacity to pay deep attention, and enters us into a state of life that is almost purely mental. Disassociated. We have this cultural archetype of the perfectionist as the early riser, the overachiever, the clean and elegant secretary who dots all of her I’s and crosses all of her T’s and does not leave the sky-high office until well after the boss does, who keeps her tube of toothpaste clean and her kitchen sparkling, who religiously makes use of her daily agenda, classic type A, Virgoan, immaculate (externally).

She notices things. She has a good grip. 

The other side of perfectionism, the side that we often cannot even comprehend as the result of a perfection-urge, is the frozen individual, chronically under accomplished, distracted, forgetful: the emotional perfectionist. The person plagued by the sensation that they cannot possibly begin to really live until all is safe and sound inside. The person who is waiting for the confirmation of their goodness or proof of their wrongness before they touch anything, before they commit to anything. They believe that they must understand who they are before living life without realizing that “Self” is something that becomes clear through the act of living. With all of that panic inside, what can be clear? What can be instinctive except for error?

☆

10am. I have had an espresso (two) and sit now with my laptop at my desk beside the terrace doors. The window is open a smidge. Deep shadows of morning float in. I am not listening to music. My brain hums, the generator hums: heat. I go to work in a few hours. I’m thinking: I wish I were still being like I was being last night. Last night was a pool of being, and the disaster was calm. The emergency wasn’t true. Love was everywhere like spiderwebs. Love was a teacup on the table. Love was my lipstick stain on his glass. Love was the way he kept returning. Love remained true regardless of where the body went. Love was his voice, soft after a long silence. In the silence I panicked: I imagined being unloved. In love the conversation unfurled in no one way. The product of two natural beings. All was right. Love was incredibly tolerant. Love buoyed me and gave me an interest in being useful. Is it always here, surrounding?

Why, at times, do my eyes not see at all?

Perfectionism has a seductive mouth, but fills you with a stagnating nature. 

Nights of conversation.

Realization: That clenched, anxious, fawning, and unassertive personality that I have leaned on to ensure love, protection, and positive perception is not, in fact, me. I thought it was me. Totally and sincerely, we overlapped, we lived as one. She deeply sabotaged everything that I wanted on a soul-level but I did not mind: I felt that it was my lot. I felt that she knew me, or was me. One morning in the swamp-green dawn after a storm cleared I sensed a distance between our forms. I knew in that one instant that I had been false: I had believed too much in the faultlessness of my own thoughts. I believed that to have a feeling must make it true. In the end, those thoughts were the belief that I was incapable, unlovable, and unknowable-–and those thoughts, while only thoughts, later took form to direct my decision-making, my perception, and thus my life.

Q&A. How would I show up differently day to day, both in the context of routines and life-creation, if I let go of the subconscious goal of perfection.

Would I avoid discomfort less? Would my definition of discomfort change?

Would I still need to take so many naps?

Would I become knowable by you?

☆

Realization: circumstance is not always a reflection of what is most true.

Perfectionism, the energy it carries (proud, heavy, avoidant, exhausting) and its limiting structure, produces an anxiety that seeks to succeed on the first attempt. I want to do it and be done. An ideal wish: succeeding on the first attempt reduces the amount of time I need to soothe  myself in the discomfort of undergoing deep transformation. But this  avoids practicing life. Perfectionism is interested in acing the conversation rather than entering the complexity of conversation, where image dissolves and things are not always done “correctly”; must be done honestly, presently; must want nothing but to be (true). Wanting to succeed on the first attempt produces attempts that barely ever unfurl as “full attempts”: are only ever a weak motions towards attempt—intellectual, intellectually designed, not produced via alignment, instinct.

The grounds of a true attempt is packed full of too many variables for the anxious mind preoccupied with avoidance of “failure” and discomfort. A genuine attempt is, in reality, an ongoing activity in which “failures” offer up information for reroutes and redos. Genuine attempts require presence, a willingness to iterate, a submission to flow state, trance, being.

Success then is not a far-away, hypothetical “one day”—it is the inevitable result of a set of actions, somatically-held beliefs, and consequently adopted behaviors. Success is not a destination: we do not rise to success, we align ourselves with it. But success is not always the point of life. Not at every stage. Sometimes the point of life is learning how to live one.