Reply #32: I'm a very flawed character in a story I'm writing. [View All]

It's hard to explain. I used to be a compulsive perfectionist about some things, and entirely oblivious to other things. I used to look at the things I've built, the things I've written, computer code, etc., and wince at all the flaws. Now I try to see the flaws as a sort of personality, a reflection of my own personality. If the things I built were perfect then they wouldn't reflect me-- they would belong to someone else.

I used to have a job in medicine that demanded perfection, the sort of job where if I was not perfect people could die. I was good at it, nobody died. But even then, people with such jobs do make mistakes, have bad days, and somebody dies. And nobody is perfect, which means in a perfect world nobody in their right mind would accept the job that requires this kind of perfection, and everyone would be worse off for that. So you make a leap of faith, and you say to yourself, "in this job I am not perfect but I am still making the world a better place than it would be without me."

In my life I try to do the same thing as it relates to my happiness. I can do some home improvement, or write some computer code, and when it's done I see every last flaw, flaws that nobody else sees except someone who is very familiar with that sort of work. It used to bother me a lot to see these flaws and I wasted a lot of time striving for perfection. In the very same way I could beat myself up because I wasn't putting myself in a place where I could be happy, and I wasn't seeing the huge flaws in myself that other people saw, especially as it relates to my mental health issues.

But then I started looking at the things I'd made as if they had some sort of personality. It was the minor flaws that gave these things personality. After that I began to allow myself the same grace.

Even this post I'm just tossing out here, knowing it is full of flaws, because if I tried to make it just right, a perfect reflection of my attitude, then it probably wouldn't get done, and it wouldn't reflect my sometimes pedantic self.

:P

Cripes, I used DU's spell check, and there were no spelling errors except "cripes." That never happens.