Fear of Perfection

Perfectionism. It can be a good thing, one of those skills you put on your resumé as “attention to detail.”

It can be a character trait that brings you into the world of editing and proofreading because you’re one of those people always catching mistakes.

But it’s a double-edged sword, especially for creative people like writers, because it can also lead to writer’s block.

When you have that perfect idea in your head and then can’t get it down on paper (or screen) exactly the way you want it, do you call it good enough- or throw it all away? Do you know the feeling when you agonize over the blank page for that first sentence because it has to be exactly right before moving on to sentence two? 

Are you afraid to show your writing to others? Getting any form of criticism? Or you wrote one great book and now you’re afraid book two won’t be as good?

This fear can extend to more than our creative writing. I’ll agonize over social media text then, when I’ve posted it I’ll worry even more. What will others think? Will they get the joke? I’m supposed to be a professional- what if there’s a mistake?

We’re always afraid of what others will think, and how they’ll judge us- especially in this Internet Age.

There’s even a medical term for extreme fear of making mistakes: atelophobia. It can be paralyzing and anxiety-inducing. I’ve been in therapy long enough to know that fear and anxiety are kind of the “give a mouse a cookie” approach to life, except you don’t get a cookie.

We get anxious when we sit down to write: what if no one likes what I write?

Then we can’t type out the scene we want to and it becomes a self-filling case of not writing something we’re happy with. By the end of the session, you have a blank page, knots in your stomach, and no cookie. And that’s if it’s a low-stress/anxiety day.

What we have to work on is the always difficult job of reminding ourselves to balance that fear with our joy at trying new things, or writing — either for ourselves or to share our stories with others.

We’ll never make everyone happy all the time.

By now we probably know you could post pictures of fluffy puppies and still get internet haters.

Keep that in mind next time you start to feel the fear of not having your writing be “good enough” (whatever that means to you) to share with someone.

Heck put a picture of fluffy puppies (kittens, ferrets, or your favorite cuteness) next to wherever you write to remind you: you’ll never make everyone happy, so make yourself happy.

That’s why we write in the first place, isn’t it? We write to make ourselves happy. To give ourselves a cookie.