Poetica Magazine

I was with a group of friends this past week and one of them said that she had learned something recently:  that procrastination is another form of perfectionism.

This took me aback because I have never thought of myself as a perfectionist at all, but certainly a bit of a procrastinator to some degree at various points of my life.  Let's put it this way:  in my house I start projects that stand undone months later.  So I thought, how can someone live in a wreck of a house and be a perfectionist?  Aren't perfectionists the ones who rope off their living rooms like the mothers in Skokie I grew up with, covering their couches with plastic?

But it turns out that when I start something, like cleaning out my daughter's room, I'm suddenly not happy with just cleaning it out.  No, I have to make a bag for Goodwill, and one for my niece's children, and another to be thrown away, and then I have to rearrange the furniture, and then, well, maybe we should recarpet the room because we own a flooring store, and why not paint the walls?  Right around the time that I get sick of crawling around the floor with my vacuum cleaner crevice tool, I give up, at least for that day and then that stretches onwards. 

This makes me wonder how many things I've done this with in my creative work.  How many pieces go unfinished because I can't get them just right, the freelance jobs that I've gotten that I'm afraid to finish in case the finished pieces aren't exactly perfect - perfect enough to get me a career and accolades and everything else I dream of.  How many mosaic pieces do I have that I got stuck on, searching for that perfect glass or tile, leaving my studio in a shambles, leaving pieces unfinished?

It was disconcerting to hear this, and more disconcerting to know so clearly that it's me.  But now that I know, how am I to cure it?  Shovel all the junk in my daughter's room?  Throw all the toys away instead of sorting them?  Allow flawed writing to leave the house instead of carefully proofing until I'm bleary-eyed with lack of sleep? 

I think I'll procrastinate thinking about that till morning.

Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

Guest Bloggers - If you're interested in writing a guest blog for Poetica please email me at lindajpr@hotmail.com.  The blog posts on Sundays with topics related to Creative Process, Publishing, Holocaust, Criticism, and Promoting Work. Please tell me what you'd like to write about and provide a sample of your writing.  Thank you.