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About This Author
My name is Joy, and I love to write.
Why poetry, here? Because poetry uplifts its writer, and if she is lucky enough, her readers, too. Around us, so many objects abound to write about. Once a poet starts with a smallest, most trivial object, he shall discover that his pen will spill out what is most delicate or most majestic hidden inside him. Since the classics sometimes dealt with lofty subjects with a lofty language, a person with poetry in his soul may incline to emulate that. That is understandable. Poetry does that to a person: it enlarges the soul and gives it wings. Yet, to really soar, a poet needs to take off from the ground.
 
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Everyday Canvas
"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself."
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
David Whyte
This is my supplementary blog in which I will post entries written for prompts.
November 17, 2014 at 12:27pm November 17, 2014 at 12:27pm
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Truth be told, I like perfectionists. If it weren’t for them, we were still trying to build fires in front of our caves. If we didn’t want perfection in our world, we wouldn’t want peace, love, and brotherhood/sisterhood. If certain scientists didn’t care for perfection we wouldn’t have electricity, internet, and the keyboards we write on while answering this prompt. Being a perfectionist is fine as long as the attempt to perfection is directed toward a goal or to the task at hand, and not to our own or others’ judgment of us.
If perfection is aimed at how others will think of us or our work, we are introducing judgment and self-righteousness, by thinking we need to be better than the others or best in anything. Thus comes the idea that, since we didn’t rise to perfection, we may be unworthy of adoration, love, and belonging, or we are not special, but something ordinary. This sight of our vulnerability makes us feel shame and clam up. Let’s face it, no one, even the smartest and the most capable, is always best at everything.
Shame is universal and it needs judgment and secrecy to thrive. Both our own personal judgment and thinking that others are using that judgment against us foster the negativity of shame, because pride and narcissism, as much as we deny those inside ourselves, are often the sisters of shame. If we didn’t care about our place in society and what others would think, we wouldn’t feel shame. From this point of view, shame happens to people who need to connect to others. Those without the ability of connection to others, and as a long stretch, to their own selves, wouldn’t feel shame.
Then, how do we overcome these feelings of shame when we truly care about the work at hand? I believe the cure for shame is empathy. Empathy for ourselves and for those other perfectionists who feel this shame. Empathy to show that they are not alone, as empathy says, “Me, too! I can fail, too. Sometimes, failure will happen. It is all right, as it is part of our hard work.”
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Prompt: Is there a relationship between perfectionism and feelings of shame when what we plan to accomplish does not come out quite right? Explore.
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