Perfectionism - A reflection
I love to write
Ever since I was a young girl
I remember creating stories
And while I don’t remember what they were about
I remember sitting up
And writing
For hours at a time
It’s funny though
Because I don’t know a lot of grammatical rules
Or maybe I do
However, am not confident in my ability to speak to them
And my vocabulary isn’t as grand as I’d like it to be
Or perhaps what I think it should be
I also often go
Long periods of time
Between writing
And am behind in several writing pieces
Like manuscripts and my dissertation
So sometimes it feels like I’m not a good writer
And as I write this
I am seeing the word “perfection”
In my mind’s eye
Am I comparing myself to what I believe perfection to be?
I have never framed the ideals
In my mind as perfection
But rather as the “right way” of doing things
As a guideline
But no
As I approach closer
And peer into my inventory
Of ideal ways of being
They are more like
Laws
Punitive by nature
A memory appears
Of my mother’s face
Distraught with anger and annoyance
At the outcome of my performance
Per her request, I had finished vacuuming
However, traces of the vacuum were not found
There were no rectangle sections of
Triangle shapes
Evidence of carpet being pushed and pulled
In a uniform fashion
The vacuum left my hand
And her words poured onto me
Heavy as though from a bucket
And I curl forward
Weighted by the pour
Drenched in shame
Learning
That I was incompetent
Granted I was about 8 years old
And just pushed the vacuum around
With the sole intention of
Trying to hit all the spots of the floor
And she was likely very exhausted from working
14+ hours a day
While maintaining the home and caring for a family of 6
(Talk about the 2nd and 3rd shift)
However, lessons like the one described above
Was taught to me in varying forms
Throughout my childhood
If I did not do things in a specific way
And in its entirety
I was lazy
Doing it wrong
Or simply did not know how to do it
This later showed up in cooking in front of others
Giving presentations at school
Casual conversations
And cleaning things at home
These lessons that I absorbed
Manifested as anxiety
Fear
And self-doubt
These lessons turned into barriers
To my understanding
That it’s okay to be in my wholeness
That wholeness isn’t just what we choose to shine a light on
For others to see
It isn’t just our accomplishments
Our losses
Pieces of our story
That we find to be the most interesting
Parts of ourselves
That we think are the most acceptable
Lovable
Darling
Sad
Strong
Or bad ass
It is all the dips and hollows
The sheen and dull
The sharp and round
The hairy and bald
The scorched and frost bitten
The content and lukewarm
It is all of us
And the act of hiding parts of ourselves
Leads to a lesson around
What is okay
To not only show the world
But also, what is okay to show ourselves
And in a quick whisk
We shun away pieces of ourselves
Sentencing them to harsh punishments
Locking them away
In darkness
As though to shield the world
And ourselves
From the prisoners
That we despise
And have enacted horror
On the communities
Of which is our bodies
We are taught these parts of ourselves are then
Bad
But in our lessons that simplify
Our experiences into a narrow dichotomy
Of bad and good
Isn’t it difficult to comprehend
Let alone accept
Having “bad” pieces?
For how can we only have parts that are bad?
Our understanding
Of our wholeness
Is broken
Divided into shards
By the impact of oppression’s hammer
Pieces of darkness
Are then akin to an infestation
Of burrowing insects
Leaving behind the stickiness of shame’s slime
Eating through
The organism
Of who we are
And we come to understand
That if we are infested
Then we must be bad
But this paradigm erases complexity
For when did
The symphony’s
Layers of tone
Frequency
Varied volume
And
Pauses
Become bad?
Our understanding of the human experience
Is so often placed into tight
Air entrapped containers
Our language
Not capable
Of fully describing the human phenomena
For how do we communicate sensations
That arise in our bodies
Our minds
Our hearts
Our spirit
Our energetic field
Into words?
How do we capture the complexity of love
Happiness
Loneliness
Dread
Fear
Excitement
Into words that fully describe
The flood and flow
Of energy
Of succumbing to
The lift
The height
And the fall
The depth and the shallow
And all that’s in between
