Perfectly Imperfect

I've always been a perfectionist.  Ask my mother, and she will tell you a story about me in the third grade turning a simple assignment into a multi-hour process.  I'm a bit fuzzy on the details now, but it was some kind of word search that I spent hours creating, making sure each letter was the proper one, that there were "almost" words, and so on.  If I could be that intense about something at that age, it makes me wonder if my perfectionism is innate to my personality, or if it's something I learned, or a little bit of both?    The older I've gotten, the more I wonder who or what I was trying to please and achieve?  Was it for my parents?  My teachers?  My peers?  Myself?  There's always been a high level of pressure that accompanies such perfectionism.  I will never be perfect, and no one else will either.  So why is it that I think I need to be?

One of the worst things about being a perfectionist is the expectation you set up for yourself.  It's constantly unattainable, and always will be.  I will never be able to live up to my own standards.  And the worst part is that I'm constantly setting myself up to fail.  My best will never be good enough.  But does anyone else even notice?

I have found myself frustrated in several jobs, because I am working my ass off, and getting nowhere.  I have essentially placed myself in a management role, but of my own accord.  No one asked me to take on so much responsibility.  So why do I then get frustrated when I'm not promoted to the position equivalent to the work I've been putting in?  Why should I be compensated when I was doing all those things within the parameters of my current job title?  I was the one pushing myself to do more, and it often went unnoticed.  At the end of the day, I found myself frustrated, exhausted, and completely drained.  I was putting in far more than I was getting back, and it wasn't benefiting me in any way.  I'm not saying you shouldn't set goals, work your hardest, give it your all.  But you also have to take care of yourself.  No one else is going to do it for you.  And in trying to be the perfect employee for someone else, I was losing myself in the process.  

So now what? 

The perfectionistic part of me feels like I've failed somehow.  That all of that just wasn't [good] enough.  But in retrospect, I think the only person it wasn't enough for, was me. 

I think I have often used my perfectionism  as an excuse.  Take this blog, for example.  It's been in my head for months (years even, if I'm really being honest), but I hesitated because I needed the perfect title, perfect template, perfect subject matter.  None of that exists, so here I am instead, being open and honest, and taking a hard look at the things that have been holding me back in my own life.  It's easy to point the finger, shift the blame to someone else.  It's much more difficult to take responsibility and own up to the fact that maybe, just maybe, we are responsible for much of the frustration in our lives.  Simultaneously, we are also responsible for the joy, satisfaction, and happiness.

So now I begin the process of finding me, the true me, who acknowledges her shortcomings along with her strengths, who recognizes her problems as well as her possibilities, and who realizes that life is made up of imperfections and how perfect that truly is.

Will it be a perfect process?  Hardly.  But here I am, just me.  Perfectly Imperfect me.  

Welcome, and thanks for joining me on this journey!