Growing up, I was heavily involved in dance. Dance was my passion, my love, my joy – my life. However, my love for this art was secretly chipping away at me under the surface. In classes, every move I made and every step I took was analyzed, criticized, and critiqued until I was perfect. Slowly, this external judgment became my internal dialogue. It took something I used to turn to for enjoyment and expression into something I began to try to avoid as much as I could. At the time, I was wondering Why is something I supposedly love something I never want to do anymore? So I took a step back – I did not stop dancing, but I went from dancing almost six days a week to maybe about two. As I’ve begun to dance in college, I was exposed to a new environment, a welcoming and safe space that encouraged my creativity and never pressured me to be perfect.
As I’ve gotten older, there are so many new hobbies that I want to start and try, but there is this deep rooted fear anytime I get close to starting. I began to realize maybe my issues with perfectionism stem from my early dance years, and that I was projecting this fear of not automatically being good at an activity right away, meaning that I could not enjoy said activity since I would have to work so hard on it. Therefore, I would avoid trying something new – out of the fear that I would not be perfect immediately. What sense does that make! No one is good at anything the first time out!
In Emma Chamberlain’s 2021 video haircut, she was doodling when she made the comment “I don’t have to be good at it to do it.” This quote has really stuck with me recently, and although it was seemingly a throw away statement, there is so much truth to those words. We do not need to approach things with a perfectionist mindset – instead, it is important that we enjoy what we are doing, that we are having fun, rather than being perfect at it. With the way that the media landscape is shaped nowadays, there is increasing pressure that we need to be perfect at everything we try, otherwise why do it in the first place. I am here to say, don’t worry about being good at whatever you want to do, just enjoy it!
