“Life moves in seasons…”

I should know this. I do know this. After all, I love “Turn! Turn! Turn!” (fun fact: I’m a big 50s-60s folk music fan), as well as the chapter in Ecclesiastes on which it’s based. I tend to preach this mantra to my friends, so why was it that when it was said to me, I felt as if I’d never heard it before?

If your answer was, “because you don’t practice what you preach", then you’d be correct. And a jerk. Don’t you recognize a rhetorical question when you see one?

The saying, “You are your biggest critic” is an understatement when it comes to me. Boy, I am hard on myself! What people may not know about me is that I’m a perfectionist. That perfectionism works in tandem with my anxiety, thus creating my procrastination. Procrastination then leads to incompletion, causing frustration, doubt, and disappointment.

When you’re like me, you think you should be able to get everything done at the same time, and you feel like a failure when you don’t. But even multiple spinning plates come down one after the other.

After beating myself up about not committing to my blog and writing as often as I said I would, my mentor reminded me that life moves in seasons and that it’s okay for ….

Despite what I said on here, to myself, or to others, I thought I had to post at the frequency of “x”, figure out how I could speak on every current event, and be published regularly to be considered a writer. What no one knows, well now you do, is that lately, I’ve been in the doubt portion of my cycle because I let so much time go between posts. Thinking that maybe I’m not taking it seriously enough. Not realizing that, in addition to my day job (where July-mid-September are the busiest months), I’ve been focused on GRE prep and PhD applications (I’m getting into somebody’s school, dammit), and had a medical issue I had to deal with.

I can’t lie, even just typing all that gave me anxiety. And as I’m typing, I’m looking over at my planner that I haven’t filled out today, the budget planner that needs to be completed, thinking about when I’m going to study…that I broke my morning routine by sitting down to write. Thinking I should be doing everything but what I’m being led to do in this moment. However, there’s still another voice that’s reminding me that she’s proud that I broke from normal routine, and that sometimes it’s okay to do so. “How many times”, she asks, “how many times have you had an idea but it never materialized because you stuck to routine instead of getting it out?”

Okay, I’m rambling…

While I was so stressed about writing, or the lack thereof, I didn’t realize that it wasn’t the season for that. It’s not always a block. Writing just wasn’t the spinning plate that needed my immediate attention. I am a writer because I write. And right now, my life may not allow me the luxury of posting every week, or even every month, but certainly not every day. Life does, in fact, move in seasons. So I have to move with it. I have to lead with compassion and give myself permission to do so.

Finally, in my quest to battle perfectionism, I’m going to post this, unedited. Because what I’ve also been told is that “done is better than perfect.”