photograph: pinterest

Something about me is I love having passion projects. However, I always stop myself by saying “I’ll do this when…” or “I can’t do this because…” – then, I’d finish the rest of those sentences with some sort of excuse. For myself, I feel like when it comes to starting something new, I always want to get it right on the first try; this is why I feel like I need to do it at the right time, but what constitutes the right time?

However, I’ve come to realize that there is no right time.

Thinking about the times when I felt like I had started something at the right time, it had nothing to do with the timing. It felt right because I had finally started. I still struggle to let go of my connotation of the “right time.” Like right now, I have the urge to start something new but I have no clue how to go about it. I caught myself saying “Maybe this isn’t the right time to do it.” But what will be the difference between now and a couple of weeks or months from now? I still won’t have a clue about how to go about it unless I actually get started.

Getting started is the hardest part because it makes or breaks an experience. If you start and keep pushing through, who knows how far you will go, Whereas if you start but stop because of some bumps along the way, you won’t know where you could’ve gone. I know that for myself I have found myself in places where I have quit and I questioned if I had continued where would I be now? But even though it hadn’t worked out I had still reached that point because I had gotten started. I noticed that a lot of my hardships aren’t even a result of starting something new. It’s a result of me stopping myself before I can even get far enough.

My perfectionist habit of wanting to get things right on the first try is something that stops me from being able to push through the doubts. Narrowing down what I was really scared of in my doubts was a fear of failure. I’ve noticed that when things don’t work out for me after I put my time and energy into it I see it as a waste of my time and energy. I’m still trying to break that belief because even if it didn’t work out it definitely wasn’t a waste of time and energy. I was able to experience and learn something and even if it hadn’t felt like it benefited me, it did.

Not being able to see failures as progress already puts me down a path where I make everything harder than it needs to be for myself. For the longest time, my perception of failure has been seen as a spectrum. On one end it was a failure, on the other it was a success. This perception also enforced the belief that progress was linear to me. Wanting to be able to stay on that linear trajectory I thought I needed to do things at the “right time” for it to work out.

However, progress is not linear.

The graph that I think holds all my progress in a linear trajectory does not exist. There is nothing that tells me that I’m behind or am losing progress.1 step forward and 3 steps back are still progress.

Let this be a reminder that the only person in your way is yourself.

Until next week,

Reese

Maybe She's Just Lazy?

photograph: pinterest