Is There an Antibiotic for Perfectionism?

The internet and I aren't getting along lately. I snap at it, and it snaps back, harder. I expect too much of it, and it disappoints me. I keep crawling back, like a fool, because I need it, but what I need more is to separate our work relationship from our emotional relationship and put all my efforts into the former. This process continues, haltingly, hurtfully.

Isn't this beautiful? I look at this picture when the internet beats me up and I feel sad.
I'm one of those little lights on the other side of the mountain. Click to embiggen. 

I've had middling luck with books lately. I was galloping along through two a week, or thereabouts, and then I read half of an uninteresting one and screeched to a halt. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I started Between the World and Me, which is quite short, but which I still haven't finished. I keep taking deep breaths between paragraphs, and I have quit a little over halfway through and can't seem to start again. Not just because of the subject matter, and the emotional difficulty wrought by my various histories held next to it, but because the writing is brilliant.

There's such a difference between good writing and full-on brilliant writing, and I always forget it until I am faced with the latter. Like an incandescent lamp (beautiful) against the morning sun (staggering). It's too much to take in quickly. The book, in multiple ways, is itself too much. Too painful, too many ideas too challenging to confront, too beautiful, too angry-making, too heartfelt, too guilt-inducing, too bright a star. I think this is part of the point, to overwhelm me, but that doesn't make it easier to read.

I've made an attempt to write every day, per my New Year's resolution, but I've written in six of 26 days in January. That is failure in any jurisdiction. I examined my failure this morning and came to a terrible conclusion: I don't want to finish the Ceremonials project.

In doing the math, I found that I could be done with a draft in maybe two or three weeks if I wrote a half-hour every day. I couldn't believe it, that this thing I've been putting off and chewing on and figuring out for going on two years could be over so quickly if I just sat down at the notebook for a ridiculously small amount of time each day (much less time than I waste on my abusive boyfriend the internet), but no matter how I rejiggered the numbers, the math came out the same. I did this math six days ago, and in those six days I wrote zero times.

This is an upsetting habit I've developed in the last few years: stopping right before the finish line. I do it at work, at school, at home, everywhere. From laundry to research papers. It's when I'm almost done, when the remaining work is goddamn negligible, that I feel the strongest urge to quit. This was not my work pattern when I was younger, not in my secondary school years nor in my college years nor in my twenties. I think it's some kind of adaptive mutation of that old foe perfectionism, but I don't know how to stamp it out. MRSA defeats state-of-the-art hospital environments, after all.

Because I could be done in less than a month, could start on what I consider (this time) the exciting work of rewriting most of what I've written, and I'm remembering every day that I'm supposed to write every day, and I'm still not goddamn doing it, the only conclusion I can come to is that I don't want to finish. When that thought shot through my mind, I immediately agreed with it.

I think it's because I've put a lot of feelings into the success of this project, even though what constitutes that success is self-defined. If I finish, I might look back and find that I have not succeeded. If it's unfinished, I don't have this problem.

Yeah, that's perfectionism, all right. Shitballs.

In other news, school starts today. I think I've bitten off more than I can chew - three classes - but I have pretty much never regretted doing so. I'm off to explore.

Just Keep Swimming

Many months ago, Matt drew my attention to a video of John Cleese giving a talk on creativity. Because I am not a very good wife, I didn't watch it until a few weeks ago. My excuse was that it was long - more than half an hour - and I'll grant you that's an okay excuse, but I should have watched it anyway. Because it's terrific.

Here is a transcript, if you prefer.

I'm going to guess that everyone who watches/reads this will walk away with a different feeling of what the best idea in it is. So I won't claim that what I got out of it is the most important thing in the video. But golly, it's been helpful in the recent past. In case you have no time to watch the whole thing and draw your own conclusions, here's what I'm talking about:

You know I mean, if we have a problem and we need to solve it, until we do, we feel (inside us) a kind of internal agitation, a tension, or an uncertainty that makes us just plain uncomfortable. And we want to get rid of that discomfort. So, in order to do so, we take a decision. Not because we're sure it's the best decision, but because taking it will make us feel better.

Well, the most creative people have learned to tolerate that discomfort for much longer. And so, just because they put in more pondering time, their solutions are more creative.

For me, these kinds of problems are what my characters are going to be like and what made them that way, what the insides of their apartments look like and what kind of clothes they wear, how I'm going to get from point A to point B in the plot without boring the reader or jumping too awkwardly. Solutions to problems both small and large.

Actually, I can give you an example of a problem where I haven't given up when the simple answer arrived. In my KUFC book, the antagonist group has put together an energy initiative which causes serious harm to my main character and her people. This is in an alternate-history U.S., in the 1940s, and it's a project that is extremely harmful to the earth but on which the antagonist group has put a positive spin, claiming it creates natural, sustainable energy for the general populace. I thought for ages trying to come up with a name for this project. The name had to be slick and memorable, had to indicate both benignity and corporatism, and had to be a word that would eventually make my main character shudder at its very thought. And the only word I could come up with, after thinking and thinking, was Greenpeace. Which is a word that, as most of us know, already exists and has its own connotations and that I can't possibly use.

I argued to myself that I could use it, that it would be a sly wink to the real 21st-century reader, would be yet another clue (as if the reader needs one at the juncture of the book where the project appears) that this was an alternate timeline. I almost convinced myself - but no. It's not the right word. I have to find another one. I'm still sitting solutionless under this problem, BUT, thanks to John Cleese, I'm not afraid of the discomfort of not having that solution yet. I'm using Greenpeace in my notes for the time being, until I come up with the right word, but I'm determined that there'll be another solution coming along sometime in the future. Because this is a shoddy solution and it won't do.

There's a way in which this instinct toward pushing on through discomfort to find the Right solution - not just the convenient one - ties in to perfectionism, which makes me, a recovering perfectionist, very uncomfortable. It's the same little voice, saying keep going because that's not a good enough solution, that dogged me and paralyzed me with not good enough not good enough not good enough for so many years. I don't want to venture into dividing perfectionism into good and bad, because I really couldn't say without bias, but I think driving on with intention toward the best solution is a different thing than failing to start because you can't achieve the ideal solution.

In the past week, I've started to believe keep going is really the only thing that works. It's certainly how I got through the hardest times in my life, and it's simple and catchy enough to sit in my brain without meanness and motivate me. It's how I wrote 2,000 words last night that I trust. Hard to argue with results like that.