Practice Being Imperfect

I have an adorable little deck that I use for creative inspiration, and this morning the card I pulled said, “Fire Your Inner Critic.” I laughed when I saw that card because I knew it would give me great satisfaction to fire the part of me that wants me to perfect all the time. That part of me never wants to give me a break. It is relentlessly critical, to the point where it won’t let me do anything. It sabotages my creative impulses by questioning them to death. Every creative act gets put on the witness stand and is put through an excruciating inquisition.

I have struggled with perfectionism for most of my life. I grew up with narcissistic parents who wanted their children to be perfect. We had to get perfect grades, be perfectly dressed, have perfect manners, and go to the perfect schools. Everything I wrote in school had to be perfect. In fact, my father took it upon himself to rewrite many of my grade school compositions, leaving me feeling completely crippled as a writer. As the years went on, I noticed that I second guessed everything I wrote and had a nasty habit of editing every sentence to death. Yes, that was a painful death sentence for my writing. I expected every paper and article to be perfect on the first draft – an impossible feat for even the best writer.

That awful parental critic had become internalized. I was living with it day in and day out. It haunted me constantly, seductively whispering “you can’t do it” into my ear. It made me believe that I was a horrible writer who didn’t have the right to write. I got to the point where I had lost all motivation to write because the thought that was running through my head was, “Why bother writing if it’s going to suck anyway?”

It’s amazing how we internalize the voices of other people, even if they denigrate and invalidate us. To reclaim our creativity, we need to replace those harsh, critical voices with soft, encouraging ones. I’m finding that it’s a moment-to-moment practice to catch my inner critic in the act. It can be extremely cagey. It can convince me that it has my best interest at heart, but it is actually putting out my creative fire.

The perfectionism of our inner critic is a killer. It prevents us from taking risks and expressing the soul of who we are. The best way to beat your inner critic is to practice being imperfect. So here’s my advice: Set out on your next creative venture with the intention of making mistakes. Give yourself permission to do it really badly and celebrate how bad it is. I plan to write my next series of blog posts that way, just for the fun of it. And I look forward to reading your imperfect comments!

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