I attended an LGBTQIA+ Buddhist meeting on Zoom and in the meeting we talked about individuality and being true to ourselves and how chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo helps us tap into our own inner mission. I thought about this because I was struggling with perfectionism this morning: I needed to find the perfect apartment, the perfect job, the perfect salary, the perfect place to live. And I ended up burning out as I always do. When I wanted to publish my poetry book on Amazon, I just couldn’t do it. I just felt this voice in my head telling me, Your poetry stinks. Don’t publish it. I searched on the Internet, scouring pages for people to affirm that yes, I should publish, or no I should wait it out. Browsing the Web for people to tell me what I should and should not do was not only silly, it was also toxic because I was feeding my ego, my insecurities. I was depending on others to validate whether I was worthy or not. So I asked myself in that moment, what do I really want to do? Do I want to keep going down this rabbit hole of job searching? Do I want to sleep and beat myself up and cry about how I supposedly haven’t measured up to anyone’s expectations of me (expectations that, in retrospect, I have made up for the past twenty something odd years)? Or do I just want to write on my blog and write in my most authentic voice? So I did. I finished my review of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, but felt Oh what if I write more? What if I’m not finished? Then I panicked because my cello lesson was coming up and I thought, Oh crap I haven’t worked on this piece enough, what is wrong with me, oh gosh I’m gonna bomb it. I spent the whole morning writing in what the notes were on the music because it’s a scordatura piece that requires you to tune down the A string to a G, and I panicked because I didn’t want to miss any notes when I played for my teacher. I wanted it to be a note perfect performance.
And I was running late because I kept working on the piece, kept getting frustrated with myself. So finally I did a sonorous gongyo (a morning and evening prayer that involves reading the 2nd and 16th chapters of a Mahayana Buddhist teaching called The Lotus Sutra) to have the best lesson I could. As I gathered my things, I thought about the RuPaul quote on self-love that goes: if you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else? I realized that if I couldn’t love myself, then I couldn’t love the person in front of me, no matter how hard I tried. But how would I put that self-love into practice?
The clock neared 6:30 and I was running late. I stopped at the red light and panicked inside. But suddenly a voice said, “you’re not a perfectionist.” And with that I repeated that mantra in my mind as I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo while driving, and it helped me calm down. It also made me realize that my teacher is a human being, too, and that they make mistakes sometimes, too, just like I do, so there was nothing to beat myself up about. So I arrived and set up, and when I played for them, I repeated this same mantra to myself: you’re not a perfectionist. A few things I learned when I did that: I let go of labeling myself as a perfectionist because I realized right then and there that perfectionism truly does not define who I am, no matter how many times I tried to convince myself of this lie. I also realized that when I dropped the perfectionist label and stopped calling myself a perfectionist, I was more okay with making mistakes, and I was also more open to feedback from my teacher on how to better express the piece. I also was less worried about playing the notes wrong, and was able to just play from my heart straight through the piece.
I also was able to treat every piece of feedback like it was a nugget of wisdom rather than as a way of throwing me off my get it perfect, my way or the highway routine of practicing. I realized the reason I got so frustrated with myself during my past cello lessons was because I was holding myself to some pretty unrealistic standards. In the July issue of the magazine Living Buddhism, there’s this excellent article about the Buddhist view of perfectionism. In the article there is a quote by Daisaku Ikeda where he encourages young people to recognize that they are not perfect, and that failures and obstacles are opportunities to grow as a person, so young people should stay true to themselves and continue to carry out their unique mission in life. Moreover, when I told myself I wasn’t a perfectionist, I lightened up and stopped worrying so much about what my teacher was thinking about me as I played. I appreciated that moment the feedback they gave me and ways I could improve the piece. Letting go of my former perfectionist identity let me ride home in peace, remembering that I did my best and played and worked with the other person in the most authentic way that I could. I also stopped thinking so much about the person I have a crush on. I had tried to create this perfect image of them, but I realized that unless I let go of being a perfectionist, of calling myself a perfectionist, I was always going to hold unrealistic expectations for the person and people I love in my life, and when I let go of that label I was able to embrace the actual person and not just the idea of them. I was also able to focus on my writing rather than just think about the perfect ideal of us together.
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