Do not betray your most authentic self. Including your tendency to make everything perfect.

All those who procrastinated on what they were passionate about for years, ended up never doing what they procrastinated doing at all for the rest of their lives. I know of no single person that put off doing something they were passionate about for years who managed to finally start doing those things years later successfully. No one. In fact, they ended up being advocates for why it’s a waste of time to even try to do or become those things. They find pleasure talking people out of similar dreams all the time, like they’re so noble and virtuous and trying to make the world a better place by stopping other people from ruining their lives by being or doing something that is too ambitious. They take pride in holding other people back, and they call this being rational and realistic. They discourage people from pursuing their dreams, goals, aspirations, desires, ambition, passion, and the betterment of their own lives for a living, and they never feel guilty about it. They think they’re doing the right thing. It’s like a law of nature. You either do it, or end up pushing yourself and other people away from doing it, because you must think you were right about the disastrous decision of giving up on your dreams for the rest of your life, or else you’d regret it for eternity. You’d rather betray your most authentic self, than go through regret, because for some reason you prefer the absence of taking action to putting in the work. You don’t want to be wise. You want to just sound wise. You are afraid of change not because you don’t want to lose your authentic self, but because you have a phobia of getting better. You hate to improve, because you think you’re perfect the way that you are from the start. There’s a difference between having a mother that says meh toward whatever achievement you make, no matter how great it is, which makes you think you’re not enough as a human being no matter what you do, and thinking that you are perfect in every way imaginable from the start without even trying, because this kind of parenting is criminal. She is wrong for having denied you all encouraging emotions. Including the emotion of being impressed by how amazing you are, even if you really weren’t that special. Still, that doesn’t make you perfect the way you are from the start without even trying. I can’t grant you that, no matter how profound the trauma of the withholding of emotions that you’ve been through is and will always be. I’m not minimizing your trauma, and I’m not victim blaming you. I’m not invalidating your feelings. I’m not trying to tell you to snap out of it, or that it’s not that big of a deal. I’m not telling you that you are wrong to be or feel hurt this way or to that extent. I will never do any of that. Ever. Narcissistic abuse is arguably the single most horrible and severest form of torture and abuse a human being could ever go through, no matter what. What I’m having trouble with is the issue of wanting to heal and find their true self, while simultaneously demonizing an essential part of their nature and who they are, which is their perfectionism. They think that they should kill any perfectionism that resides within their souls in order to unlock their full potential and maximize their progress, when their desire to do so only serves as a tool to maximize their self-loathing and imposter syndrome, without positively impacting their success, productivity, creativity, progress, or potential in any way, shape, or form I can think of. They should embrace their true self and nature, except when it comes to their perfectionism or perfectionistic tendencies. I wonder where you guys get your reward from. Will you ever reach true fulfillment at some point, or are you just going to settle for talking about fulfillment only instead for the entirety of your lives without ever bothering to try to taste it for yourself? Have you ever tried to pursue being a full-blown perfectionist to the fullest and see where does that lead you? Have you ever felt a proclivity toward correcting mistakes indefinitely with no end in sight just for the love of it, because you are not doing any effort to bypass or suppress the perpetual desire of wanting everything to be divinely perfect? Did you focus more on the annihilation of mistakes instead of improving the quality of your content, writing, work, or whatever that which you’re creating? Or you just have a phobia of trying to do anything well or perfectly, because of your trauma, or because your trauma says so?

Suppressing your perfectionistic tendencies won’t do you any good. It will just force you to always have no option but to settle for profound mediocrity.