Rough Drafts

A Series of Pieces Written in The Wild

Lucas Van Oort

#8

Things my perfectionism tells me:

1. I am not enough. Not qualified enough, I don’t have enough skills, or enough life experience. I don’t deserve certain things without enough under my proverbial belt.
2. I am too much. Getting too old, too opinionated, too uncouth. Too real. Too surreal. Just be quiet. I waste too much time when I could have kept my nose to the grindstone. That way people could exploit my labor without knowing which face to attribute it to.
3. I need to stay thin. Be body neutral as long as my body remains generally straight-sized.
4. Stop living in a fantasy world. So many people have it so much worse and I’m missing so many opportunities to test out whether a meritocracy actually exists even when all my previous attempts determined that it didn’t. Better try 1, 5, 100 more times. Just to make sure.
5. I think of the family I have been mostly estranged from the last few years and how unacceptable they would find my appearance after all this time. Bare-faced, a tattoo, an undercut that pruned all the curls around my neck my mom liked to sproing.
6. It still frustrates me that no matter how direct, clear, and soft-spoken I am that others will still do their damndest to misunderstand me and label me the hostile one. My perfectionism tells me maybe it is my tone or not enough “I” statements but my indignation responds, “It’s most likely sexism, you asshole. Jesus f*cking Christ…”
7. The rest of my emotions are also pretty exhausted by perfectionism. Sadness and grief think perfectionism is an overbearing, wound up bitch. Anger would like to hunt down a fax machine and then throw it at their head. Joy finds much amusement imagining slyly pushing perfection into the canal.