dear perfectionism

A break-up letter

Perfectionism is a beast. A bitch, and a beast.

Often when you can name a beast, see it for what it is, it loses power.

Perfectionism seems to transcend this strength of awareness.

What is perfect? 
It is nothingness. 
It is a black hole of something worse than inaction:
it is the swirling void of
                    beginning,
                       thinking, 
                   thinking, 
                         beginning, 
                        trying but not really trying, 
                        doing something once then 
                     running 
                 back 
              to
 safety. 

and like lower belly fat I want to shed it. Let it slip away with the tension in my right shoulder. So, naturally, I wrote it a letter.

Dear Perfectionism,

I do not hope these words find you well. In fact, I hope they find you withering slowly. Not painfully, at least not excruciatingly so — maybe just with a dull and tolerable ache. I do not wish you a violent death but rather a slow journey toward the darkness or the light; whatever it is you see at the end of the tunnel you must go toward.

You see, I believe in the power of ideas. In the nourishment and challenge of creativity, of stories, of exchanging worth and value in all kinds of forms. Yet you have held me back from diving into the sea, into the waters of writing and business building and learning and, ultimately, of being seen.

Not once in my life have I felt confident in a bikini. Or there was one time, last summer, when I was very tanned and probably underweight. I remember lying on a white plastic chair by a newly renovated aquatic and recreation centre. My ex boyfriend swam quick laps and I tried lazily to read but was just thinking about the sex we’d have later.

The discomfort of being is your doing, perfectionism. It is a seed you planted before I was even born, buried into the folds of the skin of my mother and grandmothers and great grandmothers. Many would argue otherwise, yet I see at least a little truth in the theory that we are not unaffected by the lives of the cells from which we are born.

You feed the hungry narrative whose verses course not only through my mind but through my whole body. That story of a smaller waistline if only I could find the formula for moving more and eating less without losing the energy to focus on those I love, to tend to the garden of my life. The story that I can not be loved or wanted or enough if my thighs do so much as touch. Sometimes, the thoughts you fed were so mighty I came to believe even the most irrational of claims. Twenty of a woman’s years spent under the assumption that thighs should never touch, not even when pressed against the hot leather of a friend’s car seat in summer.

It has been in your name that I have fretted over the length, colour, texture of my hair. Unable to get dressed out of fear of failing to construct the correct combination of top and bottom and shoe. It is by your loathsome light that I have stood paralysed at the counter, unable to decide which milk to go with my coffee and if it should even be caffeinated.

I suppose I could thank you for your high hopes, for believing I really could be capable of achieving everything on your list - the one as long as the night sky. Thank you for having such faith in my potential. And yet the standard to which you held me - as high as the earth is deep - made me small. Your urging to be better better better more more more bled me dry, left me swirling lifelessly in a small, stagnant pool. I watched, lifeless, from this puddle as those who managed to find space from you ducked smiling, their lips pressed together in held breath as they surged forward through the rolling arcs of life, the towering and immensely blue waves of it, before emerging out the other side and pulling into their lungs deep, quick breaths.

Perfectionism, we had our time. A good run. We achieved much, it is true. We had our moments, when thanks to you my hair shone and the light made my skin glow and I somehow got accepted into that masters program, pulled my GPA up to a high place. Yet there is more I need to do, places I need to go, and you are not welcome.

I want to spill out and I cannot do that with your thick, inflexible marrow stuck in my veins, rusting like red tension in my hips. There is so much that matters in this world and almost none of it aligns to what you care about. So I set you free. I let my belly be a belly instead of trying to make it a washboard. I let my words emerge as they need to. And I trust all the sayings, the ones that go something along the lines of:

letting go creates space to grow
it is not easy but it is the way of things
and resistance is but a rebirth of resistance.

Farewell, perfectionism. I hope your final breaths are shaky, that the last bursts of air to grace your terrible lungs bring some relief. I hope you sigh as you slip from me, from this world, after your long life. I hope you find peace and watch from wherever it is you rest as, without your weight, I ascend peacefully.

Love,

Ruby