The Perfectionist’s Trap and September’s New Colours
September is my favourite month. And it’s only partially because I can wear suede boots without having freezing feet or feel very french in my trench coats. It’s mostly about the colours. They have always been beautiful, but lately they are extra bold. They have a new nuance of freedom and eternity. Orange does not stop when it turns crimson but it rolls out all the way to scarlet red and then back again but a different way. The leaves float freely. And just when you think they will hit the ground, they waltz with the wind for another chorus. And it’s a wonderful natural phenomenon, that this has happened just as I have come out of my self-imposed achromatopsia.
It is hard you see. You need to train your rods and cones to see the colours in between, when what is not clearly black or white is a challenge to our comfort of order. It is the guilty pleasure of the perfectionist, to control, to categorise, to reduce people and experiences to clearly defined perceptions. For so long I have walked through life with two boxes on each side of me. One labelled “white” and the other “black” and as I lived through, I took each experience and folded it neatly into one of the boxes. My room is messy but my past and future were organised in alphabetical order. The trouble is, that living this way suffocates the present moment and asks of it what it cannot give. And so for a long time, when I encountered something that I struggled to categorise I put into a third box called—“colourless, not worth bothering with”. I stripped it of it’s meaning but mostly I deprived myself of the joy of life and possibility for connection.
But does a rejection story need to have a happy end in order to be celebrated? Does an encounter need to meet your expectations in order to excite you? Do people need to fit into our ideas of who they should be in order to be loveable? Do we ever really know the meaning of what we are going through until we have the value of hindsight? I used to think that answer to these questions was a clear, unambiguous nod. But I am starting to see that things are a little less clear-cut and little more vibrant. I am starting to see that when you add a little red to your blue, it turns purple and that there are always two versions of the same story. And it feels like jumping on a trampoline and it tastes like ripe fruits in summer. If we want to be free, we need to let go of control and let life take control of us. We need to open ourselves to the possibility, and the impossible, the colours and the seasons, the unexpected and the frightening. Just because we can’t see the meaning from where we stand does not mean that there is none, it means that we need to keep walking.
Perhaps you’ll fall in love with a guy and he’ll turn out to be gay, but you’ll meet his wonderful friends, perhaps your boyfriend will move to a different country but you’ll find a new dimension to your relationship, perhaps you won’t look the way you want to and you will learn that people don’t bond over perfection. Perhaps you will meet someone who is “too different” than you and you will see that when you go deep enough in me and deep enough in you, we are the same person. Perhaps you will get rejected from a job a hundred times and you will learn that it is not the happy end that makes the story worth celebrating. It is the little voice that kept whispering “try one more time and just one more time”. Perhaps it won’t make sense so much that it will teach you to appreciate the beauty of an unfinished story.
And perhaps it was because so many times I asked for life to fit in my picture frame and it didn’t. Because so many times I tried to find the point in it and couldn’t, that I eventually had to throw my frame away. And when I come to think of it, maybe that has been the point all along. Ah, all the bright new colours!
To Reality
With Love,
N.
