#shitty drafts

[eveisnep]

His side.....

This is going to fucking hurt.

I still wish it could have been you. I so wish It to have been you over everyone else. It still hurts myself that I had to hurt you so that you won’t talk to me anymore. To leave you there because I know you’re just confused and you don’t know what you want. I needed to stay away from all of that. I needed to focus on myself.

How it started.

Honestly. I wish you messaged me at a different time. I was honestly trying to figure out two things. I was figuring out how to clean up everything from my ex. Clean up my entire closet because there’s so much that I didn’t have closure on and some other things that we needed to clear out and finish.

Then you came literally right before, during or after a person that made me interested in being with someone again. In the beginning. You had me. You still do. I wait for a call or text that finally says. I’m ready to have that second chance. Are you? Just a time where we can talk it out. But we never did.

Anyways. let me restart.

[benspillowbook-blog-blog]

Things Unpleasant: Perfectionism

Anne Lamott said:

"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it."

I memorized the first two sentences long ago, and I always remember the sentiment of the rest.

I've made trying to resist the lure of perfectionism one of my life's goals, and I wrote a fun little parable for an office newsletter that I edit all about bashing perfectionism in the face.

So I guess I have to come to grips that letting go of perfectionism means forgiving yourself when you can't let go of perfectionism.

Which isn't easy to do.

I have to give a presentation at a conference in a few weeks, and normally I rock and roll with that sort of thing . . . except, for some reason, I'm having a hard time synthesizing my research into anything more than, well, something that sounds like synthesized research. Maybe because smarter people have written about it better (and in a more boring way) than I'm capable of. So I'm struggling.

Today I vowed to finish it.

Well I spent the entire day hand-writing a shitty first draft, then typing a shittier second draft, and crumbling all that shit up and doing what you do with shit: flushing it.

Then I got a brilliant idea!  Another parable! You're a writer, Ben, I thought. Use that.

So I did . . . and there it sits, shitty and unfinished . . . 800 words without a home.

But that's the goal right? Shitty drafts. I'm good at those. And I'll finish tomorrow, right? Tomorrow will be this presentation's Waterloo, right?

I just feel like I wasted the day . . .

So I remind myself: You didn't waste the day, you experimented. Some of the experiments failed, but you learned something. Tomorrow the experiment will succeed.

Not a wasted day.

Let's just hope my boss agrees . . .