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# Blogging for perfectionists

Tuesday 19 July 2011
Tagged with

- Blogging
- Perfectionism
- Writer's block
- Reflection

I had an idea for a post. I could feel it growing in some ill-defined region inside my skull. I’ll just bash it out in half and hour and hit publish — I could do with getting a few more posts up. So I started to write.

Half an hour came and went. And still it grew.

I wanted to be able to do my thoughts justice, to bring the world some insight. It wanted to be lucid, well-researched, a valid contribution to society that could hold it’s head up high.

So I kept writing for a while, but it still wasn’t ready. I had to take a break. I’ll get back to it tomorrow.

And so I did, for a few days at least. Then other things became important and I couldn’t quite remember what my point was and the whole thing lay half-finished like some simile I can’t quite think of right now.

Sorry for inflicting that lump of stream of consciousness on you — I wanted, for reasons which are probably apparent, to get in some practice writing what I thought and then publishing it. A lot of my posts seem to go that way

It’s tricky overcoming perfectionism. It feels like everything I do should be a work of unmitigated genius before I can expect anyone to read it but it also feels like sheer arrogance to think that anything I do might be considered genius!

There’s a balance to be found between expressing your ideas with clarity and wit and grace and just getting them out there. We all get the balance wrong some of the time, but it’s by recognising this and correcting it that we get better at it.

I’m glad I got that out of my system. If you’re still here, congratulations for making it this far.

Here’s to having faith that my ideas will stand on their own. I’m not an idiot you know. :)