The Balancing Act

Last night as I was laying on my couch reading, I haphazardly pulled my hair into a bun to get it out of my face. I didn't care how good it looked, or if it pulled my hair back in a weird way on my forehead making me appear bald, or if I missed a few strands in the back. I finished the chapter I was on and went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. When I noticed my reflection in the mirror, all I could think was holy shit, this is quite possibly the best messy bun I think I've ever done, and I did it without any real effort. If you ask anyone who styles their hair in messy buns, I bet a lot of them will agree that sometimes the best bun happens when you do it in a few short seconds without a mirror or any bobby pins in sight. It's when I'm trying too hard to make it look perfect, or when I'm forcing the placement of my weird baby hairs, that the bun looks bad.

I know it sounds ridiculous, and maybe it's the amount of self-help books I've been reading lately, but my next thought after I was done admiring how my hair looked was that maybe this could be a metaphor for life. Think about it! When we really want something to go just right, how often does it go wrong? Or it goes right but not right enough? Or it goes right but doesn't follow our original plan at all? And when that happens, how often is it because we thought and agonized and overthought some more about the whole thing?

Perfectionism seems to breed disappointment, with hairstyles and with life.

I'm not saying we need to just stop caring altogether about things we want in life. I'm saying -and I need to spend more time working on this too- that we need to learn to stop for a second and recognize the difference between caring about the end results of a project and wanting every single tiny detail to go perfectly, so much so that if one thing goes slightly different from our original plan we give up instead of adapting to the new route the project has taken. This is something they stress heavily upon in any craft writing workshop or class in college. As writers, we are taught that it's sometimes not us who have control over our characters or plots, but the other way around. We quickly learn that if we don't loosen the reigns a little bit and allow our characters to tell us who they want to be or what they need to say in a particular moment, then we have a story that feels forced, and no one wants to read a story with characters or plots that feel forced.

Now obviously with real life and things we want to do or create, there is a delicate dichotomy between I need to make this happen and I can't force this, if it happens it happens, I have no control over this. It's a difficult balance to accept because if you too often go by the first rule, you will more than likely find yourself forcing something, either on yourself or others. The first rule does not apply to forcing unhealthy relationships to work when they just aren't going to work, or forcing your 90 year old great-grandmother to suddenly be able to do a cartwheel. Similarly, the second rule does not apply to things you actually have more control over like finishing school or getting into ridiculously good shape. Neither of those things "just happen", you have to make them happen. Finding this balance in life is difficult, and I imagine the grasp we have on it can ebb and flow throughout life. I'm not expecting myself or anyone else to always have a clear idea of how we're supposed to handle every single situation thrown at us, especially since a lot of us are still barely even adults. In fact, I know a lot of "real adults" who still don't have a strong hold on this whole balancing act.

This is the kind of thing that I find myself having struggling with constantly. In fact, as I was writing and editing this, I was flippantly disregarding any criticism I received from someone I love very dearly because the thought of them having anything to constructively criticize about my writing freaks me out. I want so badly for everyone to love absolutely everything I write and put out into the world that my perfectionism rears its ugly head, keeping me from actually being able to produce something I'm proud of regardless of how well it followed my original plan. There's nothing wrong with wanting something we do or make to be great, but wanting it to be perfect presents us with unrealistic goals, hundred foot tall hurdles that we put in front of ourselves.

What's important is that we learn to recognize the things in life we can and can't control, and where we can go from there.