Perfectionism Is Gumming Up My Keyboard
I have a confession to make.
Despite my best efforts, my voice and vision are being stifled by the hobgoblin of perfectionism.
Here’s how that little bugger is currently showing up in my life:
Stuckness and indecision
Feeling pressure to tie everything that’s messy up with a bow
Constant craving a “good outcome”
Shyness about my vulnerability
Embarassment about not having my shit together
Hiding out
Case in point? I have a story to tell, and I’m not telling it.
Why? Because it’s “not finished yet.”
Well, forget that. Today I’m going to tell an incomplete story, with the understanding that perhaps that’s the point. Maybe I’m not supposed to – or can’t - write the ending without you.
This tale begins in 2012, a year after my divorce from Wasband #1.
(Oh yeah, did I mention perfectionism has a dashing twin called SHAME? In the face of my second divorce, shame has been making quite a ruckus as well. But I digress!)
That summer, I decided to get my first major tattoo: a phoenix on my back to memorialize my rebirth.
Now here’s the thing — I didn’t want it to include color. An aesthetic choice, yes. But also a fearful one. Although I wouldn’t have put it that way at the time, there was a part of me that was still holding back.
Hiding from my own vibrancy.
What emerged then was beautiful and I loved it. It was also a representation of what I’d now call “the early stages of rebirth”.
Seriously — check out the wings. Faint, papery, and disproportionate to the mass of the body.
What we’re looking at is early emergence.
A legitimate period of the rebirth process when we’re not yet strong enough for full flight… but whole, proud, and getting there just the same.
Recently, I decided to return to this tattoo as a way of marking my current cycle of death and rebirth.
While there’s a lot I still need to figure out, what I do know is that it's time to blow out those wings and bring in the color. To live even more boldly. To listen to the language of my body, and the wisdom of the phoenix’s teaching:
A life fully lived requires us to acknowledge and experience every stage of a phoenix’s cycle: flight, the fall, burning, ashes, rebirth, and back to flight.
A lot has been shifting inside me over the past year, and I’ve had to linger for an unaccountably long time in the Ashes stage. Tending the bones in a process that psychotherapist and ritualist Francis Weller so beautifully terms “an apprenticeship with grief.”
What I’ve been learning in the charnel grounds is that our soul has its own call and response pattern. A circling around core themes across our lifespan.
With every turn of that wheel we get to choose: stay near the surface, or keep diving deeper.
Perfectionism and shame kept me on the surface of my life for decades. Until I just couldn’t run those plays anymore.
I began to wonder: what if I’ve got the picture upside down? What if our lives are not an endurance test, but a creative practice?
If that’s the case, we’ve got two choices:
Set into stone some fixed ideas about who we are, and keep coloring inside those lines
OR
Continue embellishing - adding texture and color, or even completely redrawing the lines in response to what we learn.
So here I am, in the messy middle. Coloring myself in.
The perfectionist in me wanted to wait until I had a clean “before and after” to write about this. The storyteller wanted a narrative with a snappy punchline. The coach wanted to take the smoldering ashes of my life and turn it all into some kind of object lesson.
But that’s not how life works. The reality is we’re all a canvas in progress. Nobody’s got it all figured out, and anybody who says they do is high.
My guess is that instead of some big answer to life’s challenges, you may be craving raw honesty as much as I am these days.
So here’s my real-time truth:
Leaving my old life behind was non-negotiable AND I miss its illusions every day
I’ve been training for years in anticipation of the threats we are now facing as a society AND I often don’t know “what to do”
My inner world is rocking in very uncomfortable ways AND I’ve never been healthier or more whole
I’m traumatized AND I’m privileged
I feel more alive than ever before AND I am not sure how to tap into and utilize that energy
I know I’m enough AND I never feel like I’m enough
I have no idea who I am AND I know exactly who I am
I feel overwhelmed by the world AND I’m equally inspired by the possibilities before us
I’m not pressuring myself to resolve these tensions right now. Just to notice them with kindness and self-compassion.
Based on the conversations I’ve been having lately, I know I’m not the only one straddling inner tension at this time. Most everybody I know has a confession to make, if only there was someone willing to hear it with grace and acceptance.
So I’ll go ahead and ask:
What’s one of your inconvenient truths? What paradox lives inside you today?
Let’s be human together, traversing the disquiet side by side. Making living art and soulful community from the tools and treasures at our disposal.
If any of this resonates, know you’re not alone.
I don’t walk through the coals by myself, and neither should you. Coaching, therapy, and spiritual mentorship are absolute non-negotiables in my life, and the results speak for themselves. Going it alone got me a long way to be sure, but not in the direction my soul actually wanted to go.
If you’d like a partner in your rebirthing process, I’m currently booking coaching, mentoring, and shamanic healing sessions. Hit the button below to schedule a no-obligation call if you’d like to explore working together.