Completely Okay With That

(Not my image.)

I am a perfectionist.

This is not something I have only recently discovered or anything, I just thought I'd set up with that. (Plus I think that admitting things every once in a while in writing is somewhat healthy, but that is beside the point today.) Naturally, it affects pretty much every aspect of my life, my writing especially.

Since I'm aware of this, I usually try to write all my first drafts by hand in a notebook. I can't edit as much which makes me write faster, getting more on the page and giving me more to work with.

Anyway, today some writing/editing went a little differently than it normally does which caught me by surprise. I had a proofreading exercise to do in preparation for a test coming up, and it was a simple enough task really. Edit the paragraphs and correct the mistakes.

While I didn't do it perfectly, I hadn't found and corrected all the mistakes (and I had even tried to correct what was completely fine making it more wrong), but I found myself completely okay with that and had even enjoyed it a little. Even after I'd gotten the answer sheet to see what I had missed.

This caught me a little by surprise considering I'm a perfectionist pretty much to a fault. I have a very hard time being tolerant of work that I do if it is not the best it can be.

But letting myself enjoy a task I know I'm not perfect at is really good I think. A sign of improvement perhaps. I still want to be better of course, but this time that didn't stop me from enjoying it along the way.