Between You and Me: Embracing Recent “Failures,” My Dance with Imperfection

Embracing limits, failures, and finitude as a positive

Welcome to BETWEEN YOU AND ME.

After appearing at bottom of every essay for four years, BETWEEN YOU AND ME is now a special offering for paid subscribers. Its spirit of behind-the-scenes updates, love letters to life, and recommendations from me remains. Unpaid subscribers continue to receive one essay per month. Thank you all for being here!

Dear Friends,

The topic of perfectionism, and more specifically, recovering from perfectionistic programming, feels somewhat tired and overdone and obvious if I’m being honest, especially among millennial women. Yet I am thinking about it anyway.

It’s not so much that I want to tell you that I veer towards overachieving (you know that), or that I want to distance myself from the relentless culture of production and linking our value to our work, instead finding a balance between doing and being, giving and receiving, exertion and rest (you know that, too). Instead, it’s that I am in the midst of exploring new patterns in resisting perfectionism and production not by choice and careful self-direction, as one might hope, but because I am being forced into those new patterns by something that feels like two giant Mickey Mouse hands taking me by the shoulders and gently but firmly steering my actions, and my life, into the only passageway through which it will fit.

As you might imagine…