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Despite the adages, I’ve come to believe endings are pretty easy. Closing a door comes quite naturally to me; I’ve always been a quitter. I relish the closure of wrapping things up, preferably in floral paper + a pristine bow. When you’re ending something, there is only one answer, one possibility, one destination: the end. Naturally, as someone who walks away with ease, beginnings, with their promise of more risks, more possibilities, more…unwrapping + unraveling, instill a deep knot of horror in my delicate quitter’s heart. Endings are straightforward, no expectations, only the cessation of whatever you’re exiting. But beginnings, beginnings… a vast expanse of the unknown, a journey to the beyond, no end in sight…a total nightmare to a quitter like me.
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I imagine I’m note alone in that I’m a quitter out of both self-preservation and perfectionism. My deep desire and quest for perfection make quitting and ending the next best and most resolute options in a universe where perfection is elusive. When time, resources, and gumption waver, endings offer a tidy split that beckons toward freedom and a chance to find perfection elsewhere.
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For quite a while I thought I was just a plain quitter. The sort that gets lumped in with the sore losers, the lazy, and the uninspired; only recently did I start to put the pieces together regarding the perfectionism part. It dawned on me while I was journaling one morning, pondering the usual
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What-happened-to-me?5-minutes-ago-I-was-17-and-inspired-how-am-I-suddenly-32-with-a-sad- little-life-and-a-pile-of-failures?
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situation, when I dared to investigate a dark little corner of my mind. I found there a smoldering pile of hopes and dreams; barely a spark, hardly glowing, but burning nonetheless. As I poked around a bit in that dark corner, I came to understand that the rubble pile of my burnt out joie de vivre was obscuring an underlying eternal flame of sorts. I was surprised to find the flame was vaguely familiar to me. I recalled knowing it existed, but never figuring it out, so over the course of my adulthood I had abandoned it. For most of my life, I had been under the impression that this fire needed to be fueled by accomplishment, attention, accolades, and all manner of praise and measurable success. The very light of my life demanded this. I believed that perfection was the sunlight that would grow the praise I needed to forage to keep the fire ablaze. Unfortunately, as humans do, I failed, quit, and stumbled around. I left school, left home, I left social media. I settled into routines and struggles. As I became less perfect, more flawed, older, and estranged, I received less praise, and I assumed without it, the fire would just burn itself out and that was that. However, when I found it smoldering there in the corner of my mind and I brushed away all of the detritus, I noticed the flame kept up on its own, without my interference, goading, and certainly without perfection, and I was intrigued.
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I took some time to just observe my flame – how it interacted with my choices and thoughts. I noticed that when I left it alone for a bit, didn’t engage with it, the fire did indeed remain lit. I spent a period of time in hibernation with it; refraining from entertaining any large scale aspirations. I made some strategic moves logistically in my life, but abated any scheming/dreaming beyond the basics. I learned to work with what I had, make things for no reason, start and complete tasks with no commentary or judgement, start and not complete tasks without guilt or shame. The pull of perfection was strong at first, but lessened with time and less cause for it. As there were no metrics in what I was doing, perfection became obsolete. Without an audience, without need for praise and attention, I was free to be imperfect without consequence. All the while the flame burned, and it felt especially warm when I did a little project, sang a little song, created a little craft, etc.
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This is what has allowed me to entertain beginning again. Once I became comfortable with my lack of progress, success, and otherwise, I found myself enjoying the meandering of the path, the steady glow. My natural bent towards curiosity began to stir and I had ideas, hopes, and dreams that before went ignored for lack of potential perfection, lack of potential attention. I used to do this exercise where I had an idea and would play it out in my mind front to back, judging every perceived challenge as “worth it or not” in relation to the goal. I was so afraid to experience failure and trials that I would squander an idea before even knowing if it was something I was interested in trying. All activity became halted in favor of my thought process. I always wondered, “what’s the point?” I had effectively ended beginnings. Really, I had ceased doing anything at all. I had frozen and slowed to a halt, and not a romantic restorative rest sort of halt, but one born of someone deeply petrified by trying and failing. It was only at my deepest desperate obsession with finding the point when it dawned on me that I had the wrong approach. What I really needed was to get lost in the point.
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So in an effort to lose myself in the point, I just started aimlessly fucking around. And the more I fucked around, the more I found out, if you will. I fucked around in the kitchen, on the guitar, with paper and pipecleaners. I fucked around with glue and paint and yarn and stained glass and macrame and creating vignettes with my knick knacks. I took all of the goal-orientation out of the equation and just FUCKED AROUND!!
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Where I used to manufacture a lack of expectations in hopes that the universe would see my abnegation and reward me with all of my heart’s desires, I found rewards were actually copious and came with the territory of just plain fucking around. And hoo-boy did I start to uncover some magical bits of information. I actually think I found the secret to life. I noticed my fire reacting strongly or not at all, but never weakening, always maintaining a steady glow. When I felt ignited, I did more of what lit me up. When I felt no considerable intensity from the fire, I didn’t waver or dampen, I just continued on my way, making a mental note that my fire wasn’t so hot for that. My previous cue to burn out was “not liking something” and I don’t like a lot of things. When not liking things became information for my choices and not determinants of my mood – that is where I started to really become ablaze, more on that another time.
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By taking my cue from the fire, rather than striving to harvest praise and attention for it, I reaped some good old fashioned skills, focus, and self-knowledge. I realized that my fundamental understandings of risk, reward, and the act of living were just all wrong indeed.
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When I lost the point, I found a freedom that was once familiar but had long been a stranger. I began to understand that the wrapping up and finalization I had previously considered to be paramount was always going to be a little bit impossible. There really isn’t ever an end, just countless beginnings over and over, it’s all a circle, yadda yadda. My past insistence on outcomes and fulfilled expectations revealed a prison cell I had gladly locked myself away in. Most profound for me was the hunch that I wasn’t really a quitter, just uninformed about what it really takes to do something, do anything.
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So here I am. I have this flame, less delicate than once believed, some ideas, a smidge of perspective…I feel compelled by experimentation and curiosity, rather than perfection and finality. I believe this is not only the way to begin, but the only way to sustain literally anything at all. It is necessary to be perplexed and left wondering. Fucking around is essential to finding out !!! I’ve been nibbling at life for too long – and I want to devour it. So I took a big bite and bought a 200-year-old farm with my husband and 2 cats. We need more cats, because there are also rats on the farm. The farmhouse has no heat and it was -2 degrees yesterday because, I forgot to mention, the house is in Vermont; we’ve been living here for 2 years. It is the never-ending project I needed to test out my experiment. I’m using this undertaking as a jump off point for a long, imperfect, adventure and I will be documenting it right here.
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Let’s begin.
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