For the majority of my life, I had a fixation: write perfectly in my journal.
The obsession looked like this. I start a brand new notebook with excitement. In the first couple of pages, I write perfectly neat. All the words are orderly and consistently spaced, with no corrections. I slow myself to draw evenly rounded circles. I use a ruler to create sharp corners for a rectangle.
But I’m an impatient person. I also don’t have the most disciplined note-taking skills. By the time I hit the fourth page—perhaps I need to jot something down quickly when another person is speaking—my penmanship starts to get worse. The spacing between text is no longer uniform. More strikethroughs pop up. Some text is upright; some is slanted.
When that happens, a strong sense of disgust arises: it feels like I have ruined perfection.
Frustrated and unmotivated, my calligraphy keeps getting worse. If one page is already bad, what’s the point of being good again?
At the end—when my writing becomes almost illegible on the tenth page— I resort to one of the two coping following strategies: I either rip off the previous pages to start anew (which often results in the disintegration of the notebook itself), or start another journal as if this one has never happened.
I have done both many times. My drawer used to be filled with dozens of journals with only a few completed pages in each.
One Day It Hit Me
My journal doesn’t have to be perfect.
It’s okay to be unruly. Who cares?
It took me 30 years to realize how silly it is to hold so tightly onto the assumption that every I produce must be flawless, even with my own personal journal that no one will ever read. Why subject myself to unnecessary angst and unrealistic expectations? What’s the point of being perfect?
I started to ask new questions: what if I simply accept the past pages and chapters as they are? If this page is complete garbage, how about I simply skip and move on to the next page?
More economical yet, how about I draw a line half way through this page and start again underneath?
I’m happy to report that, since that realization, I have completed four journals cover-to-cover. Now I appreciate going through my full annotated notebooks to see how my life has evolved over time. I couldn’t have done that in the first three decades of my life.
Letting go of perfection has been freeing.
And good for the environment, too.