Category Archives: perfectionism

Confronting Perfectionism–at the Literal Grassroots

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T minus 48 hours until I leave for a three-week trip to Japan, and what am I doing? Pulling grass clumps out of the gravel driveway.

During the past several years, I let the driveway and the connecting brick walkway to the side entrance of my house go to pot–or more literally go to grass. Because keeping it weed-free was like the Mickey Mouse scene in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. There was simply no way to keep up.

So last fall I paid a landscaper a lot of money to re-gravel the driveway and literally unearth the brick walkway, which had become completely covered with sod. And I thought that would be it. But, silly me–the grass and assorted plants underneath the gravel and between the squares of brick had other ideas.

Since I’m opposed to Round-Up and any other earth-toxic remedies, Google gave me two choices: weed by hand or treat the area with a solution of white vinegar and dish soap. This means I have spent many hours this summer in the hot sun pulling clumps of grass out of the driveway, since that method was listed as more effective, saving the vinegar/soap solution only for the stubborn pieces that refused to budge. I’ve discovered that while vinegar kills some of the grass, it doesn’t necessarily penetrate down to the root system, or kill all of it, so I have to keep respraying. And for every tuft of grass I pull out, I can be assured that the next week–or maybe even the next day–there’ll be more green blades sprouting nearby. Aargh! Mickey, I feel you!

Usually I just focus on the most offending area for ten or fifteen minutes, which makes the task manageable, figuring I can keep things under control in piecemeal fashion without letting the obsession take over my life. But today, knowing that the grass was going to get a free pass for three weeks, I spent two hours at the call of my perfectionist demons. Am I really a bad person if the grass takes over? I tried to talk back to them as I heaved out another recalcitrant hump of crabgrass and shook out the large pieces of gravel that stuck to its needy roots.

Of course, I’m not a bad person, even if I return to find my walkway a snarling mess.  Nevertheless, I felt deluged with shame last year when I had to admit defeat with the driveway and call for professional help–the same kind of shame I felt when I first returned to playing the piano and couldn’t get through any of the pieces I wanted to play without a million mistakes. But somewhere in the past three years with piano, in addition to acquiring more dexterity through frequent practicing, I’ve learned to laugh when I mess up, then patiently go over the tricky passages. And then, even if I still can’t play the hard parts perfectly, I tell myself I’ve done well enough for today. And that playing the piece still brought me joy. Like my flower garden, which is NEVER weed-free, but still a pleasing, cultivated chaos.

(Especially now that my walkway is clear!!)

And like all that practicing, which HAS made the hard parts easier, I’m also celebrating all the weeding I HAVE done since the beginning of the year. And I’ve got this YUGE weed pile to prove it! LOL!

And I got a blog post out of this morning’s ordeal. Considering that Substack is adding to my perfectionist anxiety by sending me nudges to blog once a week, I’m happy to have one more item crossed off my checklist. Now, on to packing. I’m looking forward to blogging next time from Japan–where I’m sure the flowers will be perfect!

 

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Gardening: An Antidote for Perfectionism

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It’s May, which means it’s time to get real about the garden!

April has always been a hard month for me emotionally. (I resonate with T.S. Elliot.) I generally feel as unsettled as the weather. The minute we get a warm day, I’m warring with my impatience, chomping at the bit to start planting, while at the same time feeling anxious about how I’m going to incorporate daily gardening time into what seems like my already too busy life. And when the days turn back to being cold and rainy, there’s actually a part of me that feels relieved that I can stay burrowed into my winter self for a while, though I wonder what masochistic inner voice is making such a silly choice. Meanwhile the crocuses, the daffodils, the rhododendrons, the pink and white flowering trees are lighting the world with promise but fading so quickly, I worry I’m not paying enough to attention to enjoy them before they’re gone.

But now it’s May. The peas, onions, cilantro, and tat-soi are all planted, and half of my garden bed has been prepared as I wait for some reliably warmer weather to plant the more vulnerable vegetables. A few of the daffodils are still hanging on, while the tulips I planted last year are springing out among the wild violets and dandelions. We’re still getting cold, rainy, weather, but this didn’t stop me from seeking the garden yesterday the minute I felt stuck with a writing project. There is something about feeling the dirt sifting through my fingers that consistently gives me my best writing ideas. My writing/gardening motto: When in doubt, go out!

I didn’t grow up loving gardening. As a NYC girl, I think I was a teenager before I realized that vegetables didn’t come from the supermarket. When I first moved to western Mass. I didn’t really get what the fuss was about when people made a point of proudly showing me their tomatoes.  Yet, gardening is a thing here, so when my downstairs neighbor at the first house we rented long-term said she’d teach me how to garden and we could make one together, I agreed. And fell in love.

Some people find the endless cycle of weeding and digging and mulching and watering a kind of drudgery, but I make sure to stop the minute I get tired of a task–which makes the 30-60 minutes I try to spend each day a joy rather than a chore.

What I love most about gardening is that I have no desire to do it perfectly. Each thing I manage to grow and harvest feels like nothing short of a miracle, even after more than thirty years of experience. If the peas don’t come up, I shrug and re-plant them if it’s not too late in the season, or figure I’ll buy some from a local farmer. Some seasons I’ve replanted cucumbers and zucchini four times before they didn’t wilt or get eaten by animals. While I like to exchange tips with other gardening enthusiasts, I don’t spend any time comparing my gardens to theirs. Really, all I want is to get my hands back into the dirt and dig up some writing revelations as I pull out the stubborn blades of grass. And to jump for joy as I see the asparagus spears poking their heads out of my little plot. And celebrate the delicious mint from last year that’s survived the winter and come again all by itself. Time to make a mojito!

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The Quest for Perfect Words

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It’s amazing how many times I can edit the same piece of writing. For the last five days, I’ve hunkered over Ganesh Ascends to Heaven, about a woman who kills an Indian pedestrian in the U.S. and goes to India to try to make sense of the man’s paintings and her own life. It’s one of the stories in my forthcoming collection, Immigrants (Creators Press, Fall 2023).

So I’ve started every morning re-reading the same 14 pages, shifting pieces of paragraphs back and forth–up and down the page, deleting words and putting them back in; deleting commas and putting them back in; going back to a file of an earlier draft to splice in a sentence I’d eliminated, all in the quest of trying to make the story sail more smoothly.

And the dirty truth: I couldn’t tell you with certainty whether what I’ve come up with is better than what I had before. But I think it is! At least–today–I like it a whole lot better!

I will say this: it absolutely helps me to take breaks from my writing, long breaks, where I can return to what I’ve written with my mind in a totally different place and assess the story as if I’m reading it, rather than writing it. I just have to hope that I don’t have too many “What Was I Thinking” moments that Christine Lavin totally nails in her very funny song.

The important thing to remember is that everything is changeable, but also to take care not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

What I noticed on the initial read this round, having not looked at the story for a couple of months was a clunkiness to the writing–details that didn’t need to be there that slowed the story down. So, I was able to chop out 300 words, shortening the story by an entire page, with no essence lost.

And I noticed more sloppiness–places where I used the same verb or a weak verb, or too many instances of words like “that” or “just.” (And this was after spending a month last year on micro-editing the entire collection, focusing entirely on sentence structure and word choices.)

And it’s also after two rounds of editing by my publisher, who has been great at flagging larger contextual/developmental questions as well as clunky and ungrammatical phrases.

So the underlying moral of this story–perfection is elusive, like the graph going toward infinity. Yet, I feel energized pursuing it, getting closer and closer to that unreachable axis.

 

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