Last night I spent an hour drafting a 100 character long post on Instagram, which I finished up with the hashtag “expatblogger”. What a joke! Surely no blogger deemed worthy of that title would have to devote that much time to a simple, short post. It was indeed a sad moment because it reminded me that I have a lot of work to do before I can dare to refer to myself as a writer of any kind. More importantly it was a reminder that my perfectionism is perhaps the biggest hindrance to my writing practice.

It has been a year since I created this blog in an effort to write more. With just a handful of posts to date, it would be safe to say that I am obviously failing to do so. I wish I could say that it was a matter of simply not having enough time, but I know, as I’ve known for a long time that my perfectionism has paralysed my writing practice. So what is to be done to facilitate my transformation into prolific writer I claim to be on Instagram? Well,  I’ve realised that the first step is naming the beast and the second is to tame it by reminding myself about why I am writing in the first place.

Step 1. Naming the Beast 

“The Beast” – my perfectionism – is above all else a character trait. I’m critical, don’t tolerate clutter and cannot imagine half-assing anything. I have high standards for myself, my surroundings and for the people in my life. I’ll skip a psychoanalysis of myself here  to discover why that is the case, because that would be useless and messy. I don’t mind being a perfectionist. In fact, I believe that my perfectionism has allowed me to do well during other periods of my life. I thrived as a student because of it and it has served me well professionally in my work as a communications consultant. The problem is that the demands in those settings, which require a critical eye and impossibly high standards do not apply to personal prose. Unfortunately, because I have been hard wired to apply my perfectionism precisely to any kind of written text, my personal writing – which I intend to be far removed from academia and has nothing to do with my professional life – has suffered. As soon as I begin writing a piece I am already thinking about the final form it will take and how it will be received, editing the expression of my thoughts before I can even get them down on the page. This realisation has allowed me to identify how I can go about rein in my perfectionism when it comes to my personal writing, and thus, hopefully taming the beast.

Step 2 – Taming the Beast

I’ve realised that my perfectionism is very much linked to a deep rooted concern about how I want to be perceived by others through my writing. For me, writing well has always been an expression of my intelligence. And as a woman and a person of colour, the expression of my intelligence has been perhaps the most important tool in my arsenal to push back against the false narratives about what people who look like me are supposed to be like. I go to great pains to write well because I’ve always recognised it  is an act of resistance. Thankfully, I have also come to recognise that it is not just perfectly penned prose that really matters, but the expression of my ideas and the act of sharing my unique perspective and experiences that counts.  Much more important than how I write is what I write about or the mere fact that I am writing at all. And so, I realise that the best way to reign in my perfectionism is simply to remind myself of the reasons I must write:

I write because I am so much more than how I write. Writing connects me to all the different parts of myself that make me who I am, beyond the expression my intelligence. Writing reminds me that I am complex, multifaceted – human.

I write for me; to reflect on my experiences, validate them and consciously integrate all the lessons I have learned. Writing makes me whole.

I write to put together all the pieces of my story that become transformed into little fragments in my memory, with the passage of time. Writing makes me remember.

I write because my story is mine to tell and because I refuse to be lumped into stereotypes and trite generalisations about who I should be because of what I look like or where I am from. Not writing is a passive acceptance of the narratives others may try to force upon me and those who look like me. Writing is my activism.