If you were a child in the 80s, you might remember this game. The word game is very generous to describe this torture device. I received one from my grandmother (for Christmas, no less) in 1982. For the uninitiated, here’s how you play: you empty all of the shapes onto the floor, set the timer, and push down the red tray. You then have exactly 60 seconds to put all of the pieces back before the tray pops up and the yellow shapes go everywhere. I forgot to mention that while this is happening, the timer offers you a kind reminder in the form of a tick-tick-tick-tick that prepares our youth for a lifetime of high blood pressure.
Look, I’m not going so far as to say that this game had some indelible effect on me, but I would say that I am a bit of a perfectionist. I’m not sure if this is a chicken-or-egg situation, but I do remember also ironing and alphabetizing my money in my youth (fun fact: US currency has a letter on it that corresponds to the city in which it was printed) or obsessively organizing my notebooks for school. In a kid, it’s kind of adorable, but in an adult, not so much. It takes forever to get anything done because nothing is done when your standards are so high.
Fast forward a couple of (okay, maybe three) decades. Right now, I’m a bit paralyzed to publish anything. Why? It’s not polished enough. It doesn’t accurately or adequately convey the message I am trying to send. But that’s the point of a blog. It’s a sandbox for thoughts and ideas and it is always evolving. It’s iterative. Just like my identity that is constantly under construction and never fixed in one place. Nothing I write will never accurately or adequately capture the essence of who I am because who I am is constantly changing. And that is not the sign of pathology; that is a sign of growth.
I can always tell that I’m anxious when I perseverate over ridiculously minute details. I remember when I first got my last job, I anguished for hours over how to display my work ID. What kind of ID holder what I have? As if this were the ultimate statement on who I am and what type of employee or coworker I would be. I remember trying keychains and around-the-neck lanyards until I finally settled on a retractable reel that I could clip on my clothes even if I didn’t have pockets. But I remember doing hours of Internet research about all of the available options from Etsy to Amazon. What was that all about?
It was my fear of failing at that new job and, now, failing at this “Great Transition” experiment. What if I do all of this and end up just getting a job that pays two-thirds of what I was making before? Or what if I do all of this and in the process, expose myself in some way that makes me un-hireable? Unless I acknowledge my fear, I’m not going to be able to get rid of it.
My rational self would make me answer these questions: what’s the worst that could happen here? And if the worst thing happened, what would that say about me? The worst thing would be not making any progress. It would be telling people that I was going to do this thing, and not accomplish it. But procrastinating because it’s not 100% polished means I have zero percent chance of failing – and zero percent chance of success.
That’s it. I’m hitting ‘publish’ now.
this gruntled worker 