Why I'm saying FUCK OFF to my perfection paralysis!
A look back at how perfection paralysis has consumed my life and the impact a late ADHD diagnosis at 33 has had on my desire to break free from the constraints of 'perfectionism'.
Recently I found myself wishing I could go back in time and decide to go to Art School now I’m 34, not 18, but I’ve come to the realisation that there is no point dwelling on the path you’ve already followed because life can only be lived forwards.
You can’t live life in the future either. You can plan, prepare, and use past experiences to help you decide which fork to travel along next, but the reality is life can only be lived in the now. As the Danish theologian, philosopher and social critic Søren Kierkegaard said,
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
Whatever decision you make now is the decision that determines where you go next. Once that decision has been made the other forks in the road immediately vanish, but are replaced with a plethora of new ones after each step you take. That can be scary. Those ‘what ifs’ in both directions (looking backwards and forwards) can be so paralysing they secretly move you from the realm of authentically living into a realm of simply existing. What happens to me in the realm of simply existing is like the entire world’s New Years’ fireworks going off in my head in a steady stream of bombardment, rattling an endless list of possibilities and I freeze because I either can’t choose or when I do choose, find the idea is joined by its favourite bedfellow, self-doubt, and I talk myself out of the idea because I think I’m not good enough. Sound familiar?
So many people make their way through life in the realm of existence, not the realm of life and I fucking hate to say that over the years I’ve become one of them. Frozen by past life experiences, the illness and death of my mum, an ongoing battle with chronic pain, weighed down by the false expectations of others (which are often just false expectations I’ve placed upon myself) and most notably, the fear of failure.
We live in a world where anxiety is the norm, where basic decisions put us into a state of fight, flight or freeze – worrying about whether we’re wearing the right clothes, reading the right books, following the right trends, whether the thing we write/make/say will be well received, whether that message to a friend is left on ‘read’ because of something we’ve done… the list really could go on and on and on and on… and simply put its fucking exhausting and serving no one well. It’s scarily easy to find ourselves in a place where we believe our self-worth is based on how many ‘likes’ we get on social media. We look for acceptance from others before we accept ourselves when it should be the other way around. We are so focused on what life looks like from an external standpoint that we forget about the most important factor: what is feels like to be living our lives from the inside. Do our choices make us truly happy? Think laugh out loud, not caring about the loud snort that accompanies it happy. That’s the kind of happiness we all deserve and if we’re fortunate and safe enough to live authentically, we should be living a life as true to our authentic self as possible. In a world centred around likes and algorithms, where Pantone’s latest colour of the year is quite literally a shade of beige, doing the things you love and trying your damnedest not to give two fucks what people think about it as a protest!
Incoming: a mini, incredibly relevant, personal anecdote tangent.
As a child I loved being creative but it’s only now I look back that I can see how much the creative process scared me. Even as a kid, I was so intensely focused on the end product being perfect before I’d even began, that I became scared of the blank page. I was petrified of making mistakes. (Side note: My recent ADHD diagnosis sheds some serious light on that overthinking, perfectionist, people pleasing girl, but let’s not digress). The internal self-doubt chatter and fear of the blank page began winning when I secretly started tracing, instead of just drawing. The praise I received from my unbelievably supportive parents, who would have still praised me wholeheartedly for my tracings had they known, felt more like a searing stab to the heart than a moment of triumph worth cherishing. Heck, tracing things as a kid is a valid way of learning how to draw but if my own drawings weren’t perfect, I was a failure. If it was ‘perfect’ but I’d traced it, I was a failure.
Over the next decade I slowly stepped away from creating and even convinced my parents that I couldn’t take Standard Grade Art because I really wanted to take History and these were in the same subject columns, plus I could always crash Higher Art in 5th year. Again, I bloody loved History, but I hadn’t chosen the subject for my love of it, I’d chosen it as a valid way to avoid the fear that I’d built in myself around my (perceived lack of) artistic abilities.
I was true to my word though and it seemed the break from creating had been good for me. I went on to complete a crash Higher in Art in S5 and for the first time created things that felt right to me. This high was short lived, because my exam submissions were swiftly met with an SQA ‘fail’. Dejected, as I’d lost my only chance to take an Advanced Higher, I asked my art teacher what he thought and he solemnly said that he felt he had failed me. He thought the marking board had changed enough to accept art beyond the realms of still life and portraiture, but it appeared that I’d been failed because I’d used mixed media and collage instead of the sticking with more traditional methods. I knew he was as gutted as me because he had fully supported my work the entire year and was one of the main reasons I felt safe to push my creative boundaries. I resat the higher in my final year of school, creating things I thought the exam board would want to see, rather than something I felt a connection to. I passed with an A, but that A tasted bitter. This time, I felt like I’d failed myself.
Fast forward a year and I was accepted to study Fine Art Photography at The Glasgow School of Art. I was ecstatic but still felt like a fraud. I believed I wasn’t ‘cool’ enough, my ideas weren’t sophisticated enough, everyone else knew what they were doing but me, etc.
I wanted to people please so much that I spent four years petrified of letting others down, of fully putting myself out there that I felt I never really committed to anything. Don’t get me wrong, I had fun, I found sparks of creativity to run with and I learned a lot. I had glimmers of ideas I was proud of, made my own cameras from complete junk and stuck to my guns when my tutor suggested I change my degree show focus. As a result of saying no, I came away as the first photography student to ever win a longstanding Fine Art award in its 150-year run. This came with my own, separate, fully funded exhibition. At the same time I applied for and was awarded a prestigious year long graduate residency in a well-known Edinburgh photography gallery and (spoiler alert) was so fucking petrified of failing that I simply buried my head in the sand and didn’t create anything I’d excitedly written about in my proposal, instead opting to take scenic photographs of my local city to post on Instagram before eventually letting that fizzle out a decade ago. I want to note, there is nothing wrong with taking scenic photographs of anywhere, but when you’re only doing it to avoid the things you really want to do… that’s problematic.
Throughout that decade that’s passed, my brain has been flooded with ideas that never made it beyond the realm of thought because the very thought of failure caused me to freeze. I know that this is not logical – what’s the worst that can happen if something doesn’t turn out the way I planned if I enjoyed the process, right? But here’s the problem; when you’re so focused on the end goal, the process, the part that’s meant to be exciting, frustrating, rewarding, challenging, becomes arduous because perfect simply does not exist; perfectionism is antithetical to creativity.
I’ll briefly refer back to being a woman who received a late diagnosis of ADHD at 33 before ending this anecdotal side-quest and returning, full circle to why I’m telling my perfection paralysis to fuck off in a minute. But this point is important, because everything I’ve written above screams ADHD in girls/women once you realise the ‘hyperactivity’ element is often internalised and accompanied by crippling self-doubt. Instead of a visibly bouncy child on the outside think racing thoughts; high achieving (yet self-deprecating); praised for following the rules, not because rules are enjoyable but because the fear of being rejected for doing something wrong weighs so heavily on your little heart; petrified of any perceived rejection (RSD); diagnosed with both anxiety and depression repeatedly, etc… but also having the innate ability to mask all of this so well it only started to became apparent once I’d reached, and surpassed, peak burnout.
Tangent: Complete
How to tackle perfectionism? Fucking dismantle the shit out of it!
This all brings me back around to my point that perfectionism does nobody any favours – least of all you. It’s time to unlearn the status quo, swim upstream rather than down if that’s the way your flow goes – be a wild salmon, they’re hardy creatures. Trust your gut and stand your ground. Think about who you want to become, not what that becoming ‘should’ look like. And no matter how scary or how many times you fail along the way (we all fail, it’s a beautiful part of living) pick a single fork in the road, commit and go down it. Then repeat. Fuck it, I don’t care if it’s a cringey connection, listen and act on the lyrics sung by Anna in Frozen II and,
“[don’t] look too far ahead... break it down to this next breath, this next step… and do the next right thing”.
It's important to know that there is no going back down any path you take but there’s always the chance to make choice after choice (at whatever pace you’re comfortable with) and there are new, fucking amazing paths to choose from whenever you need or want to. As scary as this sounds, remember there is no guarantee that any other path you could have chosen at any point in your life would have been a better one.
The only way to tackle perfectionism is to dismantle it, piece by piece. First through thought and wonder. Wonder is a fantastic thing that we often grow out of as adults, thinking it belongs in the realm of the child. In finding out way back to the that place of wonder, we can begin the process of unburdening ourselves from the shackles of perfectionism.
For too long I thought what I created mattered more than the process of creating whatever ‘it’ was - thinking everything I wrote or drew depended upon how it compared against my perceived idea of ‘perfection’ and my self-constructed idea of what success looked like. Perfection however doesn’t exist. Perfectionism is a wall, not a door. It bricks you in and eventually creates a fear that bubbles away until it boils over and you become too panicked to even try.
Just do you.
The first step I’ve taken on what’s already proving to be the tricky journey of unlearning my negative thought patterns is drawing for the first time since 2013. If I’m going to unpick the negative narrative what better place to start than the place where it all began. For now, at least, I’m only choosing to draw in pen. No ability to rub things out means I sit with my feelings of discomfort whenever I feel it’s going ‘wrong’ and either choose to stick it out, figuring out a way to make it work or choose to move on and try again tomorrow. I now realise that either way I’m learning something. It wouldn’t matter either way but in doing this I’ve already realised that:
1. I’m actually pretty good at drawing.
2. I’m proud of myself for giving this a go.
3. Facing this fear feels like giving my younger self a ginormous hug.
4. Progress does not mean perfection.
The second step I’ve made is writing (and posting) this. I’m done succumbing to the wrath of perfection and decided to make this space for myself to create whatever pops into my head in whatever form that takes. This is a space for me but if by chance it lands on your lap and you like it, that’s amazing. On the flip side, if it lands on your lap and doesn’t interest you in the slightest, that’s okay too.
Either way, it’s time to take up that space and fill it with whatever passions make your heart sing, laugh and even cry because even if you think the world doesn’t ‘need’ your ideas, you do!
Thank you so much for reading, I would love to hear from you in the comments!
When has the fear of failing paralysed you and what steps did you take to begin overcoming your perfection paralysis? Or, has reading this made you realise it’s time to put ‘perfection’ in the bin to wholeheartedly and unashamedly start enjoying the things that light your soul on fire?!
You and I are on a very similar journey by the looks of things 🥰.