“What is the correct way of life then? Life has to be lived as a game … "~ Plato
I'm a recovering perfectionist, and learning to play again saved me.
Like many children, I remember that I played a lot when I was younger and was filled with openness, curiosity and joie de vivre.
I was fortunate enough to grow up in Oregon with a large extended family with many cousins whom I was allowed to play with regularly. We spent hours playing hide and seek, climbing trees, drawing, and building fortresses.
I also went to a wonderful public school that encouraged gaming. We had regular breaks and had all sorts of fun pieces of equipment like stilts, unicycles, climbing poles, and roller skates to play with. In class, our teachers conducted many imaginative and artistic activities with us that associated academics with a sense of playfulness.
I saw every day as an exciting opportunity and remember thinking, "You just never know what's going to happen." My natural state was to be with me and enjoy the process of playing
Unfortunately, my attitude began to change early on from playfulness to perfectionism. Instead of being present and enjoying the process, I focused on performance (mostly impressing people) and product (getting everything right). The more I did this, the less open, curious and joyful I was.
Instead, I became fearful, critical and discouraged.
I first remember developing perfectionist tendencies when I was in elementary school taking piano lessons. For some reason I got the idea that I had to play songs perfectly or else I was a failure.
At some point I got so scared that I would freeze while playing in concerts. I started to hate the piano that I once loved and eventually quit.
My perfectionism also spread to other areas of my life. In school, I tried hard to get a clear A, and when I earned a little less, I felt like a failure. I have often missed the joy of learning because I was so concerned about getting things right.
My perfectionism also had a negative effect on my relationship with myself. I believed I had to look perfect all the time. As a result, instead of learning to appreciate my unique looks and beauty, I often hated my looks. I also remember how at this time of my life I turned the game into motion and used it to chase the "perfect" body.
The exercise I loved as a child felt exhausting and punishing.
Perfectionism has also hurt my relationships with other people. I felt like I needed to be smooth and together and that I always had to put everyone else's needs above my own. Unsurprisingly, I often felt unsafe, anxious, and exhausted with other people.
At this point in my life, I believed that if I tried my best and worked hard enough, I could do everything right, look perfect, and make everyone happy.
My perfectionism increased in young adulthood until it was finally no longer sustainable. In my early thirties I became the director of a small private middle school where I had taught for eight years. I loved school and dedicated myself to it.
In many ways, I was the ideal person to get the job done. But I was also young and inexperienced and made some big mistakes early on. I also made some decisions that were good and sensible choices that upset many people for various reasons.
To complicate matters, the school underwent a massive change in the overall governance of our school the year I became headmaster, and we suffered a tragic death in the community. I worked as hard as possible to help my school through this difficult time, but things felt separate.
My school, which for the most part had been a happy and joyful place, was suddenly filled with struggle, distrust and stress. These events were largely beyond my control and not any person's fault, but I blamed myself. To someone who had believed their entire life that if they worked hard enough, could avoid mistakes and make people happy, my work stress felt devastating.
I felt like my life was getting out of hand and all the rules that once worked no longer applied. I fell emotionally and I remember saying to my husband at this point: "I will never be happy again."
That was one of the darkest times of my life.
It took me several years to become happy again. One of the most important things that helped me with this was restoring the feeling of playfulness.
After my emotional crash, I decided that I was done with perfectionism. I clearly understood that focusing on avoiding mistakes and pleasing people was the cause of much of my suffering.
I realized that I needed another way to approach life.
It was around this time that my friend Amy and I started taking fencing lessons together. I was pretty bad at it, but it didn't matter. Because I had given up perfectionism, it was no longer important to me to impress people in fencing lessons or to perform perfect fencing moves.
Instead, it was important to me to be there, to remain open and curious and to concentrate on the joy.
I had a great time. I felt free and alive, and something came to life within me that had felt dormant for many years. I felt playful again. And I realized that I had lacked playfulness for many years and that this was part of what had made me become so perfectionist.
Playfulness is the attitude we take towards life when we focus on presence and process with attitudes of openness, curiosity and joy. Perfectionism, on the other hand, lets us focus on performance and product and promotes fear, criticality and discouragement.
Fencing helped me to rediscover the game and to leave perfectionism behind.
I have fully accepted my newly discovered playful attitude. It touched every area of my life and I hungered for new adventures. I started reconnecting with dreams that I had put on hold for a while. Eventually, I decided to quit my job as headmaster and return to graduate school to get my PhD in philosophy, a goal I'd had since seventh grade.
Doing a PhD in philosophy may not seem very playful, but it was for me. For six years I occupied myself with the ideas of great thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, Herbert Marcuse and Paulo Freire.
It felt like I was playing in a big, philosophical playground. But I also faced some significant challenges.
I was thirty-eight when I returned to school and a good ten to fifteen years older than most of my colleagues. Most of them had a B.A. and even an M.A. in philosophy while only taking one philosophy course in college. I had a lot of catching up to do and faced major challenges.
One of the greatest challenges I faced early on was the extensive reviews of our program. We had two main exams on thousands of pages of some of the most difficult philosophical works ever written. The exams were so difficult that at one point they had an error rate of over fifty percent. If the students didn't pass it a third time, the graduate school kicked them out of the program.
Determined to pass these compositions, I spent all of my Christmas and summer holidays studying for them in the early years of graduate school. But I still failed both exams the first time I took them, and I failed my second exam twice.
It is not surprising that I failed, given the high error rate in the exams and the fact that I was still studying philosophy. But it was painful. I had worked so hard and was scared of getting kicked out of the program.
I was tempted to go back to my old perfectionist habits because they once gave me a sense of control. But I knew that would lead me to a dead end. So I began applying all of the lessons I had learned about playfulness to the comprehensive exams.
Instead of focusing on performance and product, I focused on presence and process. I also focused on practicing habits of openness, curiosity, and joy. Mentally, I compared the compositions to shooting an arrow into the porthole of a target. Every test, even if I failed, was an opportunity to check my progress, readjust it, and get closer to the porthole.
This made the comprehensive exams a game and alleviated the pain of failing them. It helped me accept failure as a normal part of the process and congratulate myself every time I made progress, no matter how small it was. This mindset also helped me focus on proactive, constructive steps I could take to get better results, such as: B. Meetings with faculty members or tutoring in areas that I found particularly challenging. (Aristotle & # 39; Metaphysics?)
During this time I also taught myself to juggle. Juggling not only relieved stress, it was also a playful physical reminder to me that progress takes time. Nobody juggles perfectly the first time they try. Juggling takes time and patience, and the more we focus on openness, curiosity and the joy of juggling, the more juggling feels like a fun game.
I started thinking about passing my compositions down like juggling and it helped me be more patient with the process. I finally mastered the material and passed both of my compositions.
By studying for the Comps I learned to do all my work in the graduate school in a playful way.
Whenever I felt stressed out in my program, I reminded myself that perfectionism was a dead end and that playfulness was a much better approach. This helped me relax, be kind to myself, accept mistakes as part of the learning process, and take small consistent steps to improve.
This playful attitude kept me sane and helped me reach the finish line.
Playfulness was so helpful to me in graduate school that I tried to incorporate that spirit of playfulness into all areas of my life, including the college classrooms where I teach. I've noticed that students who help me move from perfectionism to playfulness instantly relax, are kinder to themselves, and improve their ability to ask for help.
I now strive to practice playfulness every day of my life and to help others do the same. Playfulness is not something we have to live behind in childhood. It's an attitude that we can bring with us all of our lives. When we do, life becomes an adventure even in difficult times, and there is always something more to learn, explore, and enjoy.
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