How I am learning to play nicely with Perfectionism

I went crazy the other day.

Stark raving mad.  Blonde hair standing on end, fists pumping and legs stomping.

What happened?  I can tell you it took me a while to understand.

It all started when I lost an envelope with money in it.   I began to search and search, turning the house upside down.  I was racing up the catastrophe ladder three rungs at a time.

The self talk was vicious.

The reality check came as I sat sprawled on the garage floor,  garbage bags torn open around me, frantically sifting through food scraps.

I was as far from Capturing Breathtaking Moments and finding anything Fabulous in my Ordinary as I could get.

What had happened?

My old friend Prissy Perfectionist was chucking a full blown tantrum.

Prissy likes to call the shots, she likes to control my life, she sets me up with rules and regulations and convinces me I will fall apart without her.  She doesn’t like me to leave the house with beds unmade, dishes not done and crumbs on the bench.  She will have me cleaning out cupboards at all hours of the night.

She sounds amazing, or does she?

She does not play well with imaginativeness, spontaneity and adventure.  She takes away happiness and joy when she goes too far.  She does not like it if I am in The Zone.

I have an ongoing love/hate relationship with her.

I am an organised person, I love knowing where everything is and having things in their place.

Constant perfect order in a busy working family home requires herculean amounts of energy.  To straighten, tidy, sort, clean over and over and over again in a day is exhausting and relentless. That is what Prissy wants.

I thought that was what I wanted.

It was not enough.  Keeping up meant I did not have any time left for creativity,

That is what led me to start this blog, this website and my slideshow business.  Opening myself up to freedom and to exploration.

I began having so much fun I decided to lock Prissy away, shut her off.  I worried she would rob me of precious time.

I decided to have some mess.

The last few weeks papers and notes have built up on my desk.  I began to shove them into drawers and pile them into my over flowing in tray.  I had cleared the surfaces but Prissy and I knew underneath it all was chaos.

I went too far.

Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project stated after her month devoted to Toss, Restore and Organise she was astonished by the charge of energy and satisfaction she got from creating order.  It made her happy.

Me too.

I missed that feeling.

I had ignored a huge part of me, just like before when creativity didn’t have a turn.

It was time to learn to play nicely with all my wonderful character traits.

I want more time to be inspired, to write, to discover and to explore.

I am also more effective in an orderly environment.

My weekly routine will now include 30 minutes to organise my office and my notes.  I will also plan time in my week for photo walks, research, photography exploration, blog reading and blog writing.

I will honour all the elements of me.

So what happened to the money in the envelope?

That night, once I had calmed down, I remembered I didn’t put the envelope in the usual place as it was messy and I was worried it would be lost.  I hid it on top of a bookcase instead, a place I would never look.

Ironically  it was momentarily lost anyway.

Do you agree Outer Order contributes to Inner Calm?