Oh, those deep seeded feelings, hurts, trauma and the like can cause problems later in life, and you may not realize it. I have always had this problem of what my mom calls “sliding.” I would skate my way through things until the last minute and pull it out on the end. So in school, I would ride the B or C, until the end of the quarter, double down on everything, pull all-nighters and the like, and pull out an A. But it was exhausting and I tended to have to give up a couple of fun nights or weekends with friends and family.
Forever I thought this was just my bad choices in enjoying myself during the slide period, and that I just needed to stop making bad choices, sit down earlier in the process and do the projects. It didn’t work. Not once. I would sit down and start the project and become so overwhelmed with the picture of the perfect end product and worried I could not achieve it, I would then give up and avoid the project until I could not anymore and rush to get it done.
One day, I realized where this bad habit came from and why it continued to control me. It goes back to my childhood, and my few interactions with my father. He used to make fun of my and my failures, and praise my sister for her great work. The problem was if I didn’t fail, he made up stories to the family that included me failing. And in my defense, anything I did I tried to do to perfection so that he couldn’t find anything to criticize me, but again, he just made up things to criticize me. I was in a no win situation. As a child I didn’t realize it, and just kept trying to perfect my perfection and solve for things that he would make up. Nope, did not work either.
And with that I adapted this way of thinking. Try for perfection, get overwhelmed by it, and just do it at the last minute so when it was criticized I didn’t take it as personally because, you know, I didn’t have enough time to do the best. Amazing how your mind tricks you into thing that worked.
The problem was I didn’t realize what I was doing, or why I was doing it, and what is really bad, why I continued doing it. More on that tomorrow.
Jen's Journey 