Giving Myself Room To Just Be Okay
So, I had a goal for March. I was going to try to average two blog posts a week, to make up for my radio silence during January and February. As you can probably tell from the dates on my last few posts, I didn't quite manage that.
My average for March is more like one post a week. There was even that time when I scheduled a post, but forgot to save my changes to it, so "Another One Rides the Bus" ended mid-sentence for a few days. But that's still a significant improvement over the previous two months. I either failed or succeeded in my objective, depending on how I look at it.
I'm really trying to look at it as the latter.
My whole life, I have struggled with feeling like I just don't measure up. The standards I set for myself (and then project onto everyone around me, assuming they have the same standards for me) have always been ridiculously high. This allows me truly epic scope for internally beating myself up whenever I fail to achieve those standards, and -- on the rare occasion I manage to actually satisfy my own impossible demands -- to tell myself "well, that was adequate."
It's easy enough, in that state of mind, to believe that not trying at all is preferable to trying and inevitably failing. Throughout my school career, I often ended up panicking at the eleventh hour and deleting my essays that I had worked so hard on, because they weren't good enough. I honestly believed it was better to not turn in anything at all than turn something in that didn't measure up.
I have fought back against and weakened this impulse over the years, but it's still there, still snarling whenever I dare to try while knowing I might fail. Every time I actually do anyway, that's a triumph, not a failure, and I'm trying to see it that way.
So I'm choosing to see March as a month where I posted several good posts, while keeping up at work, church, and in my online class. That's an accomplishment, and one I have a right to be proud of.