Blog Post 2

Throughout my academic career I was occasionally required to produce a first draft for my English and I always dreaded those assignments. I always thought to myself “Where am I supposed to start”, “How am I supposed to start” and of course the phrase “This doesn’t even make sense” would be repeating in my mind. Whenever other students in my class volunteered to read what they had I would always be amazed at what they wrote and then I would skim my own my paper and realize what I had written myself wasn’t half as good. Anne Lamott’s passage about how first drafts are never perfect resonated with me because all my life I’ve been a huge perfectionist and I wanted to be the best at everything that I did, so whenever I would be given the task of writing I always felt as though I was losing control. But this obsession with being perfect did not only come from my writing troubles, but it also translated throughout my daily life. For most of my life I felt this overwhelming pressure that I had to be perfect at everything and that I wasn’t allowed to make mistakes and as life went on this practice of mine started to have a negative effect on me. I believed that I had to please everyone and that making a mistake would only lead to disappointment. But I soon came to the realization that perfection is just a fictitious expectation that I believed I had to live up to, but in reality my life can be like a really bad first draft where at first nothing makes sense and it’s probably one of the worst things I could’ve written but with experience and revision I am able to make changes and become the best person that I believe myself to be without the pressures of the outside world.