Where to leave your perfectionism

When I was younger, I wasn’t worried. Not In the least.

I would wake in the morning with a light feeling in my chest and a carefree air about me. I would set out armed with a stick and go play in the woods and in the mud in search for adventure. 

I would crawl through culvert pipes and pretend they were entrances to magical worlds, rabbit holes to far off places. 

I would climb up to the highest part of a tree, and where the branches would meet at the center was a throne that I imagined was made for me. I would sit there and overlook my kingdom and pretend I could talk to the birds as the flitted past, giving me news of the worlds beyond. 

Then I would return home and write of my adventures in a notebook and draw maps of the new kingdoms I had conquered and discovered. Page after page I would fill with drawings and notes, describing the magic that I had found that particular day. 

But that’s not the way things are anymore. Now I’m worried, scared even, bogged down by fear and perfectionism. The stories don’t come as easy as they used to and the feeling of lightness and the glow of curiosity no longer radiates in my chest. 

Many times I have rested my pen on a blank page only to be met with a emptiness of mind and spirit. And on the rare occasions that I would actually write something, I would return to it, and rip its pages away because it was not perfect. 

I still relished the feeling of pages beneath my finger tips and the smell of new notebooks but I could never bring myself to fill them with the same colorful stories that I used to create so many years ago. 

But there came A Day I was tired of it. Tired of being perfectionistic. For my fear of creating something substandard drove me to create nothing at all. 

So I took with me a journal, perfect and empty, on a walk. More times than I’d like to admit, I had wanted to fill this book with a great many number of ideas and drawings but I could never bring myself to mark up it’s crisp, empty pages. 

So I walked to a pond’s edge and looked out upon its reflective surface, unblemished and smooth like a mirror. At its shore, I tied a string around the book and left a long tail that I could hold onto. And then I cast it as far as I could into the water. 

I reeled it in, the journal now a soggy pulp of pages. So I took it home and dried it. 

It was not longer perfect. The pages were wrinkled and the cover was beginning to peel. But that was alright. 

So I set it on my desk and opened it and began to write.