Me Vs The Reality of The Situation

Being the chronic over-thinker that I am, I regularly find myself dissecting everything I do on all levels: professionally, personally, emotionally, and basically every other way in between. I’ve also always seen myself as self-aware, almost to a point where it’s difficult to ignore my own thoughts and live in the moment.

But I’ve been bothered by this thought recently that maybe all my overthinking, overanalysing, and hyperactivity is making me miss the point, what’s really in front of me, and the ways in which I’m making progress. The saying “you’re your own worst critic” lives in my head everyday but, yet I still struggle to ignore it because I rely so heavily on my own standards to dictate what I deem as “good enough”. I’m always open to feedback and often seek it out whenever I produce something because I want to know how it looks through a lens that isn’t my own, one that isn’t clouded by my own expectations of myself, but ultimately, my vote is the one that I listen to.

As a creative and also as someone who spends so much time around creatives, I’m the first person to tell you to trust yourself but I’m learning that yes, trust yourself, but it’s also important to have trusted voices around you and your creativity that also care about your progression, people who know you and genuinely want to see you grow and progress. It’s so easy to build up our walls when it comes to our creative output because a lot of the time, it’s so deeply personal. There’s a desire to protect our work with our whole lives because it ultimately is a part of us. Add the pressure of wanting to create the perfect piece of work or content, and that’s where the reality of what we’re creating and doing becomes distorted.

I almost never feel like I’m doing enough, like there’s always something I need to be working on or a new skill I need to be learning that will somehow make me into the best creative version of myself. This feeling is tiring, almost crushing, because it not only keeps me critical of myself but also holds me back. About once a week, I find myself in a panic about the pressure I’m literally the only person putting on myself, and as soon as it’s over, I’m just like “wow, there was literally no reason for that at all”

Because the reality is, it doesn’t matter if I spent every waking minute working on my creativity or my career or even my appearance, it doesn’t make what I’m already doing and who I am as a human any less or more valid. The standards I chose to impose on myself and on my work are completely self-inflicted and are the cause of this warped sense of self and success that I find myself feeding into. Even if I was able to meet every expectation or produce the most perfect piece of creativity by all standards, it wouldn’t change that need to be keep striving for more.

I’m learning to accept that I may never meet those expectations, not because they are unattainable, but that achieving them doesn’t directly correlate to my best self. The creative and even the just the human I am striving to be is imperfect, flawed but also understanding that those things don’t make me any less worthy of the things I want in this life. Imperfection is the most realistic state of being, none of us are perfect or good at everything but we are human. I want my creativity to reflect my real human experiences and the same for anything and everything that I consume. It’s what makes every one of us unique and gives us all a story to tell. The world we live portrays this idea of perfection like it’s something that if you work hard enough for or pay enough money for, you can have it but that’s the furthest thing from the truth. Perfection is a construct that keeps us working, an idea that can steal the joy of living in the moment.

Moving forward, I’m working on enjoying the now. The ups and downs that are moulding my experience on Earth matter to me more than striving for an idea. I choose reality.