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These Are Things I Think About
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I didn't write a blog post yesterday.
I said, starting Sunday, I was going to spend 20 minutes every day writing a blog post, and at the end of that 20 minutes, so matter what I had, I'd post it. I didn't write a blog post yesterday, the second day of this little experiment to overcome my inner critic and let my creativity flow with more freedom and less judgement. Honestly, I completely forgot. It was a busy day . I had a lot of things to cross off my to-do list and then I had dinner with a friend and then I came home and packed for trip I'm going on and I really and truly did not remember this little bargain I had made with myself until I was half-asleep watching "Great British Bake-off" reruns. "Well," I thought in my drowsy brain, "I guess I'll just try again tomorrow." So here I am, trying. These first couple paragraphs came easy. I just looked at my timer, and only 7 minutes have gone by. Wow. But now I'm starting to struggle. Where do I go from here? Do I want to make some profound statement about how sometimes failing can actually be succeeding, especially if you're trying to unlearn perfectionism? Some wise words about how it's okay to give yourself grace and compassion when you don't live up to the expectations you set for yourself, and that beating yourself up isn't going to help anything? Ugh, it's probably going to end up sounding so preachy. The truth is, you were tired and said, "Fuck it." There wasn't a lot of...profundity? Profoundness? (Hold please for Google, knower of all things...) Profundity. There wasn't a lot of profundity in that thought. I could talk about the complicated relationship I have with the concepts of success and failure, wherein they exist in absolute terms and one is "good" and the other is "bad"...I guess it's not that complicated, really. Teaching a person to think about these concepts in rigid, absolute terms is a great way to create a perfectionist, by the way. So maybe that's why I shouldn't think of it as a failure to fulfill my goal of writing a 20-minute blog post every day, but as a success in acknowledging that I'm not perfect and sometimes I fall short and that's okay. I can always try again tomorrow. Hi, I'm Kristen and I'm an overthinker.
I overthink 98% of things. I'm overthinking this blog post right now. What do I want to say? Will anyone care? What percentage of things do I overthink? 99% seems too high, but it's definitely more than 96%. I rewrote that sentence about four times. I'm writing this because, as I've been reflecting over the past several months (and I call it reflecting instead of thinking because I mostly do it while staring at my reflection in my kitchen window), I need to stop overthinking. More than that, I need to let go of the ingrained beliefs and behaviors that cause me to overthink - the perfectionism, self-doubt, fear of rejection - everything that fuels the inner critic that is telling me right now I should delete this post, close my laptop, and do anything else because my words aren't clever, my thoughts aren't unique, and no one will give two shits what this post says unless it is absolutely flawless. I know my inner critic's a nasty dumb bitch who's full of shit. My inner badass, the one who's forcing me to keep typing, is telling me so. She's whispering in my ear, with those sexy red lips, that it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be real. She's reminding me that I have nothing to lose by putting myself out there. It's a blog post, for Christ's sake - no one reads blogs anymore. But I want to write one. I want to write one as a space for me to stop overthinking and start trusting myself. A place where I can give myself permission to publicly acknowledge that I'm not perfect. That somedays I'm brilliant and insightful and funny and some days I can't put two coherent words together. And that both are absolutely fine. I want to create a gym where I can work my confidence like a muscle, until it can squash that inner critic like a fucking She-Hulk smash. So I'll write. 20 minutes a day, every day. My first 20 minutes are almost up, and already I'm overthinking. How should I end it? Better be something smart and incisive, something that will leave them wanting more. But this is just the start, not the end, so maybe it's best to leave it unfinished. |
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November 2022
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