by Linda Rodriguez
(Linda is in the middle of moving. This article is a republished post from 2021, but a great reminder for us all.)
I believe in holding yourself to the highest standards you
can manage and have tried to do that for most of my life. However, sometimes we
have to learn to cut ourselves some slack – in meeting deadlines (although I’m
terribly obsessive about those), in meeting others’ expectations, but most of
all, in dealing with our own, often destructive, perfectionism. I’m at one of
those points in my life where I’m having to tell myself to stand back and treat
myself a little more gently.
After a long period of illness
and injury where I had to focus all my limited energy and strength on
immediately-paying editing and teaching, I’m moving back into writing my own
creative work and back into blogging and social media. It’s an exciting time,
but it’s also tremendously frustrating. I simply do not have the energy,
strength, and focus that I used to have. When I look back at everything that I
used to accomplish in a day or a week, I feel real grief at having lost that
kind of drive and concentration. I’m having to come to grips with the idea that
I may never regain it. So, the little bit of progress that I make each day in
my own work, along with the full slate of editing and teaching that I continue
to have, disappoints me and makes me feel like a failure.
Yet, I am making forward progress
in my own creative work. I am resuming my participation in the two group blogs
to which I belong and about to resume blogging on my own blog. And I am doing
this while still maintaining a fairly heavy load of freelance work. Am I
writing the many thousands of words a day that I used to manage, in addition to
the freelance work that I have always done? No. I am, however, putting words on
the page each day and making forward progress, even as I feel like I’m moving
at a snail’s pace. I tell myself I have to learn to adjust my expectations of
myself to fit my current circumstances.
It’s not even just my own expectations
of myself that are the problem, however. Other people have developed
expectations of me through the years, expectations that I have played a role in
establishing within their minds. As I begin to slowly move back into blogging
and social media, other people have a tendency to want me to interact with them
and do the things they would like me to do, at the level of commitment and
energy that I formerly brought to the table. Consequently, I have a twofold
problem.
Back when I was healthier and
uninjured, I was an activist and someone who could always be counted on to
volunteer my time and energy and skills for projects to better whatever
community I was dealing with. Unfortunately, I am not that person any longer.
This is a bitter disappointment to me, and it seems to be even more of a
disappointment to a number of people with whom I have been involved for years.
Having always been a people-pleaser, like so many who were raised in
dysfunctional or abusive families, it’s harder for me to deal with their
disappointment – and sometimes with their manipulation — than it is for me to
deal with my own severe disappointment in my new self.
Still, I am making progress on my
own work daily once again, and I am moving forward in this new, changed
iteration of myself. I choose to focus on those positives and try to ignore the
disappointment and negative feelings of myself and others. I am lowering my
expectations of myself to what I feel is a more realistic level for my current
reality, and I am going to expect the people who will remain in my life to do
the same, once I explain things to them. If they can’t, I will no longer be
able to keep them in my life.
The odd thing is that I think
what I’m going through at this late stage of my life is something that many
people have to go through, especially writers, who must be self-motivated, self-initiating,
and self-disciplined. I think I was able to avoid it much longer than the
average person, simply because I was blessed with an unusual amount of drive and
strength — through no effort or achievement of my own, I must say. Now, that
drive and that strength have been forcibly reduced, and I am having to learn to
say “no” – to other people’s demands on my time and energy and my own
unreasonable expectations of myself. I suspect this is actually a healthy thing
I am being forced to do.
How do you deal with expectations
that have become unreasonable or unwanted, your own, as well as those of the
people around you? What strategies have you readers who are writers developed
for allowing yourself some leeway or cutting yourself some slack when it is
needed?
