Over the weekend, I was speaking with a co-worker about her resistance to writing a paper for school and I found my thoughts returning to my not so distant days of college research papers. I couldn’t help but flinch a little.

I tend to be someone who agonizes over papers (and blogs, for that matter). I spend weeks contemplating what I am going to say and usually get really excited about the general directionality of whatever I’m working on, but I freeze when it comes time to commit my ideas to paper. My hesitation has to do with “getting it right” or making it “perfect”.  I’m afraid about my ideas being criticized, edited, and judged. But underneath all of that, my real fear is that what I am saying isn’t valuable—that it can’t possibly measure up to the perfect potential that is represented by a blank sheet of paper and therefore is worthless. So, even when I finally do get something down on paper, I either edit incessantly until the last minute, or give up, knowing it will never be perfect, and leave lots of mistakes behind that would have been easy to fix.

As much as I hate to admit it, paper writing gets at the crux of the way I operate in the world: I edit. I question what I’m saying and I withhold, and then erupt inappropriately. I tell myself that the editing is meant to help clarify what I am trying to say, but most of the time, my editing actually does more to hinder my communication; my constant working and re-working of sentences in my head rather than contributing them to the conversation has created more fights than it has resolved.

Sometimes I know exactly what I want to say and keep quiet because I want to play nice, but a lot of times I don’t even realize I’m holding onto something until after the conversation is long over.  And then suddenly all of the things that I could have said come flooding into my brain.

Through my work in the Year of More and now in my Nourishment and Self-Care lab, I’m learning how to be more present to myself, to access what I am feeling in the moment and communicate it to the people around me. I’m not saying I’m perfect at it. It’s a process and there are still days that I hold back a lot of what I want to express. But I also have the tools to be able to go back and re-engage. And as I get more practice, the time elapsed between the first conversation and the second lessens. Being present and engaged in conversations has allowed me to bring more intimacy into my relationships, bring truth to fights, and change the dynamic of my work meetings. And, when I get home at the end of the night, I’m not sitting on all of my upset, because I expressed it honestly in the moment. I don’t have all of today’s sentences swirling around in my head and keeping me awake.

I don’t want my life to be the equivalent of a blank sheet of paper—avoiding contact and relationships because I’m too afraid of making a mistake. Nor do I want it to be an accumulation of messes and mistakes that I was too ashamed to go back and re-examine and fix. Sometimes I still find myself searching for the perfect words, but I find that as I express more of the genuine words, I feel more fulfilled and nourished and the “perfect” isn’t nearly as important.

Sara