coming undone

on learning to be human in public

For the past two months, I've been attempting to write a manifesto to help me work through my perfectionism, only for said perfectionism to laugh at my intentions and derail the process at every turn. It’s the most predictable predicament ever.

Truthfully though, this has been a useful exercise for me, despite the emotional turmoil, as I've begun to see just how deep perfectionism runs for me. I’m seeing clearly how these patterns of self-sabotage sit atop a deep subterranean lake of shame and unworthiness. The label I give to these patterns of behavior is perfectionism, but when I look more closely, it's more than that. It's like a dozen different existential fears in a trenchcoat. And when I reflect on my life over the last 18 months, and how challenging it’s been, I’m seeing how this bundle of fears has been showing up everywhere. Work, creativity, money, romance, food, fitness, health, and so on. Perfectionism is fucking everywhere for me.

One of the reasons I love manifestos so much—and wanted to write one about this topic—is that manifestos have a latent transformational magic within them. When we dig into ourselves, into those subterranean depths, and tell the truth about what we desire, who we’re becoming, and then we commit those words to the page, we set the stage for magic. When we do the Don Miguel Ruiz thing of being impeccable with our word, and attempt in every waking moment to live up to the heartfelt words we committed to the page, we begin to transform, inside and out.

I've lived at the mercy of these perfectionist impulses for too long. I'm ready to begin living my life fully, beyond the box that the trenchcoat of fears has kept me tucked away in, comfortable and safe. I’m ready to come out of hiding. Hence the reason I've been feeling so called towards this particular manifesto. This is one essay that, if I wrote it, would potentially start freeing me from the paralysis that I've been living in these past 18 months.

And so I've been trying and trying, day after day, for two months, to find the *right* words, to put them together in the *right* way, to work up the courage to keep moving forward even as my inner critic has been getting louder and meaner, and I hit a wall. In round one of writing this manifesto, my perfectionism got the better of me. Big time. I’ve had to take a step back to recalibrate. But now it's time for round two.

I had a realization the other day, about how I was desiring for this manifesto to just be finished already, and for it to be glorious, and for me to re-emerge into the world with a piece of writing that would astound and delight my readers.

In many ways, that's what writing the Ungated Manifesto and the Non-Coercive Marketing Manifesto was like. For each, I went into hiding, for upwards of a month or two at a time, and then emerged all at once with something polished and profound. Those two manifestos rocketed around my corners of the internet, and praise was heaped upon me for my brilliance. It felt great, and in many ways, I’ve continued to optimize my creative process around that pattern of hiding and re-emerging with something that rocks people's socks off. I enjoy the illusion that what I do is effortless and it just comes together all at once and then I hit publish. But it's not the truth. Not even close.

The truth is that this type of writing—in which one bares their soul and lays the foundation for alchemical transmutation—is extraordinarily fucking challenging. In the background, while I'm out of sight of the public, I'm wrestling around in the mud with ideas and trying to commit the essence of my struggles and hope to the page. And like 90% of that writing has been hot garbage.

For every hundred good words I publish, there are probably a thousand incoherent or shitty words that I wrestled with to get there, which will never see the light of day. And it's always been like this for me. Outside of the few times I've tried publishing daily, I've always thrown away the vast majority of the words I commit to the page because they feel deeply mediocre and uninspiring to me. My inner critic, my wide-eyed perfectionist within, shouts at me that I will suffer some kind of tragic ego death if I'm stupid enough to publish this heap of nonsense. But I’m starting to question that.

There have been numerous points in the journey of writing this perfectionism manifesto where I've had the thought to let people into the process, and to start sharing all the lil tidbits and insights and reflections that I'm working with. There’s some really good stuff in there, which I think would be useful to fellow perfectionists. But then that same voice of fear comes back in for me. If you publish all this raw messy nonsense, people will see that you're not really that smart, that insightful, that cool. They'll see you struggling, wrestling in the mud, and generally getting your ass kicked.

It's pretty funny when I type it all out like that. I personally enjoy seeing into the worlds of the writers and thinkers and makers I admire. I don't think less of them when their process is messy and a bit incoherent. I don't appreciate their polished works any less for knowing how much of a struggle it was for them to get across the finish line. If anything, seeing deeper into their worlds does the opposite. It humanizes them. It makes me respect them and their work even more. It inspires me, and shows me that it's ok to be messy and to struggle. It's ok to be human.

It's ok to be human. Fuck, that resonates. As I sit with that, I'm realizing it's more than ok. Being human is all we have. Being human is what matters more than anything else.

For years, I've noticed this pattern in myself where I swing back and forth between believing that I am radiantly special and powerful and believing that I am uniquely broken and unworthy. Like a pendulum swinging back and forth, I always catch glimpses of the human world between these two dehumanizing poles, but I'm always in such a frenetic hurry back to my habitual residences on either poles that I never really consider that it's possible to live in the land between. I've never allowed myself to consider the middle path.

But as I sit here today thinking about perfectionism, the more I think that pattern can only be broken by choosing to be human. By choosing to stay in the middle, as best we can, imperfectly. And for me, deciding to be human means allowing the outside world into the mess that I experience every single day as I strive to write things that live up to the visions in my head.

Here’s one of the most important ideas in this forthcoming manifesto about perfectionism. Lowering one’s standards doesn't generally help perfectionists feel more alive, because there's something life-giving and invigorating about shooting for something beautiful and transcendent and revolutionary. What fucks perfectionists up, and freezes them, is the underlying belief that they're worthless unless they achieve the vision of perfection they see in their hearts and heads. It's not the vision that's the problem. It's the unworthiness. When these two things are treated as separate, some profound things become possible, such as shooting for high standards while being deeply compassionate with yourself.

So from here on out, as I step into round two of writing this manifesto and driving towards the glorious vision I see in my head, I would like to invite readers into the mess with me. I would like to try on being a messy human in public for once, and stop perpetuating the myth of effortless creative work that just comes out of the abyss perfectly polished. Even though it's satisfying to my ego to my ego to perpetuate that myth, it's not the truth, and it’s not how I want to live. So here's to starting fresh. Here’s to coming out of hiding before I feel ready. Here's to being human.