I hate it when I’m avoidant without realizing it. It’s one thing to procrastinate when I’m aware I’m doing it, but when it takes me three days to figure it out, it’s really, really annoying.
Yesterday I took some time and stuck post-its on all the chunks of manuscript that have [PUT SOMETHING GOOD HERE WHEN YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING] in them. This is something that needs to be done, but it’s also work that isn’t work. And as I was doing this, I found some other notes that I had made and completely forgotten about what in hell? At which point I started having a minor breakdown over whether or not I could remember enough of anything, ever, to revise the book because it’s a lot of words and my brain is a small and broken vessel and woe be unto me because I suck and am shaming my ancestors (only one of whom ever wrote anything past a grocery list, and that one wrote poems that I understand were not epic in scale, but none of that occurred to me until this morning) and why did I ever think I could do this and what if I forget something important and can’t fix my mess and and and and …
And hell. None of this is new, I realized, it had just suddenly got louder.
So this morning on my way to work I was contemplating this, and I was also thinking about personality types (because we’ve been doing this at work, and I’m a sucker for a good Meyers-Briggs knockoff) and how every single one I ever take, plus my horoscope, always tells me I’m a perfectionist.
Which led, in my brain, to Bill Cipher shouting “THE IDEAL IS UNATTAINABLE, PERFECTION IS AN ILLUSION, BUY GOLD, BYYYYYE!”
Which I may write on the cover of my manuscript binder in BIG BOLD SHARPIE.
(Bill Cipher is a character on Gravity Falls, which everyone should watch because it’s like Lost but animated, and Jack is waay cooler.)
Laura E. Price 