Perfectionism is Evil

Forgive me. It’s been almost a week and a half since I last blogged.

I have been dying to blog about “Breaking Bad” and what it means both to me and to the pop culture landscape for weeks, but I’ve been scared to do so. This has actually been keeping me up at night – sometimes until 4-5 AM. My biggest problem is that I need the blog to be perfect which is completely irrational. I’m not writing a book. I’m not writing an article. I’m writing a BLOG the whole idea of which is to get my thoughts down and let them go into cyberspace.

I’m worried that people will think my opinions are wrong. I’m terrified that I won’t be able to fully articulate my thoughts and feelings about what I consider to be a landmark show, the best drama I’ve ever seen and arguably the best in television history. It’s almost ironic in that in wanting to write about Walter White, I’m acting like Walter White; every word, sentence, thought, opinion must be exact leading to a flawless blog.

This is not my first battle with perfectionism. It took me years to be able to write anything because I constantly edited myself. I remember going through Europe just after college, trying to keep a journal, but failing because I felt like I was a writing for an audience instead of myself. I used flowery language and deep thoughts to bring the most inane things to life rather than capture what I was seeing and feeling. I was still writing about day 1 on day 3! By the end of the first week, I’d given up. Now my memories of the trip are somewhat jumbled, and I look at photos and can’t remember what I was taking pictures of (I’m bothered by this sentence and tried to think of better ways to phrase it, but I’m leaving it as is).

I’ve been battling perfectionism in writing for most of my life, much of it caused by internalizing compliments about my so-called “creativity” as insane pressure. It wasn’t until long after my last breakdown that I started putting my raw feelings on Facebook and eventually this blog without constant rereading and revising. Now I feel like I’m stuck again, that I have to write this brilliant piece about “Breaking Bad” that will be picked up by other blogs and shared all over the world. It’s not supposed to be this way.

I hope I can one day slay this dragon, but I don’t believe I will. More important, I hope that soon I’ll write this blog about “Breaking Bad” because I feel that until I do, I won’t be able to move on blog-wise. Plus I so want to share my feelings on the show!

Perfectionism is truly evil.