I’ve edited this email no less than 2,129 times. 🤣

I’m too imperfect to be a perfectionist. 

Says the crazy girl behind the keyboard, who has edited this email no less than 2,129 times – and counting. 🫠 

But really, I can’t be a perfectionist…

If you see me at my kids’ school drop-off, you might wonder when I washed my hair last or if I own a pair of jeans. Or why I always have a cascade of Cheez-Its falling out of my car. 

I’m not a Type A personality.

I’m not even 50% Type A. 

That’s probably why Martha Stewart (pre-prison, pre-Snoop Dogg) pissed me off so much.

I mean, just look at her. 🙄

And her “perfect” homemade flower heart.

Who has time to care about shit like that?

Not me then. Not me now. I just didn’t see myself ever giving a fuck about tablescapes or being as “perfect” as Martha.

Growing up… 

I barely brushed my hair. 

I thought bathroom air freshener could double as perfume.

I’m pretty sure my mom had to hold me down and shave my legs at 14 so I didn’t get made fun of at school. (Thanks, Mom.)

I was a tomboy. And tomboys aren’t perfect.

But what I realize now that I’m an old lady of 38 is that I disliked Martha Stewart for the same reason some homophobic people hate gay people.

They hate the thing they disown so deeply in themselves.

The truth: I was like Martha or secretly wanted to be.

I was a perfectionist disguised as a tomboy or laid back girl. 

And I have been since I was a kid. 

You see…

I started riding dressage (which is essentially the ballet of horseback riding) competitively – at 8 years old. 

I feel this line should say it all, but let me tell you more.

I didn’t just want to be good.

I wanted to be great, like the riders I’d watched at the Rolex or at the Olympics.

Now to be clear…

I realize how fucking lucky I was to spend nearly every single free hour after school and on the weekends riding horses. There's not a day that goes by that I don't see how privileged I was to live out that dream. 

Also, riding horses was the most magical part of my childhood. Riding horses was my safe space. It was healing. (There is a reason, equine-assisted psychotherapy is a thing. Horses are EARTH ANGELS. Full stop.) 

But it was also a place where I tried to be the most perfect version of myself.

It’s where I tried to be “good enough.”

It was my own little world I had created, and I felt I could control the outcome…if only I worked hard enough.

Now that I'm older and hopefully wiser...

I also can see beyond the shiny parts of that dream.

And see the stuff that wasn’t so idyllic.

By about 11 years old, I was having so much anxiety before competitions I would refuse to eat or drink water because I thought I might get sick. It was so bad my mom had me doing yoga (before it was cool) so I would not totally meltdown during my performance. 

(For the record: My mom is an earth angel too. She was not a stage mom. She was not putting pressure on me for bad scores, buying me a $35,000 horse, or shipping me off to Florida to train with Olympic riders, like some of the other girls at the barn. She was simply helping me live my childhood dream.)

My love of the sport, the need to perform and perform perfectly, was all coming from me. 

Before every competition, my brain would be on an unending loop of: What if we get a rough start and don’t halt perfectly at X? What if my horse gets scared because we were at a new location and we fuck up the extended trot? 

So much of dressage is about your ability to create trust with a large, beautiful – wild – animal.

It’s about your ability to control their movements with something as small as moving your ring finger on the reins.  

If something in that formula is missing, it’s painfully obvious. You can see it in every movement. 

And, of course, your score. 

Now, for years, I thought this obsession with performing perfectly was normal. I saw it as dedication. This is how you get good, I would tell myself. 

I didn’t see how unhealthy it was… I didn’t notice how not eating before competitions turned into not eating during the day at all. I didn’t see how trying to make every movement “just right” was killing my scores, my love of the sport, and my sense of self-worth.  

I was just blind to it. 

Now I see it and I understand I was not a high performer.

I was a perfectionist.

And my perfectionism wasn’t about looking “good” or “pretty.”

It was about control.

Or appearing that I was in control. 

Now, without telling you my whole life story, I will say this did get better when I stopped riding. 

But in some ways, my perfectionist tendencies were a bit like Erika Jayne’s latex outfits: They always made an appearance at the worst times. 

My perfectionism is why I struggled when I first became a mom. While my sister had my mom come spend the week at her house, I barely let my mom or mother-in-law come over at all. I wanted to “make my mistakes” in private.

It’s also why every time my oldest daughter Amira would have a tantrum in public I would go home and cry, then I’d schedule an appointment with a child therapist to review how I handled the situation to see how I could improve next time. Because what kind of mother am I if I can’t teach my kid to “behave?” What kind of mother am I if I have a kid with “big feelings?” As if being devoid of emotions and behaving is the key to raising a good human. Or being a good, or dare I say “perfect,” mother. 

As a business owner, this need to be perfect made me a rockstar. I would get obsessed and almost addicted to projects. If I didn’t write strong copy in the first 5 drafts, I’d keep writing, even if that meant I stayed up all night drinking wine and black tea – the adult Red Bull vodka. Naturally, this caused some serious burnout. 

My perfectionism is also why I struggle to share my writing with people.

You see…

For years, I’ve started several writing projects and made some good progress on them.

But then I will only share my writing with editors – people who can make my writing better. 

These pieces stay in creative purgatory as I edit them to death. ☠️ (Cute, huh?) Then, all of a sudden, I no longer want to do the project anymore. (That is, they did until Paper Ghosts.) 

So why did I take you back 30 years and tell you my whole life story – minus the blonde-hair-teal-eye-shadow phase? 

Because you too may be a hairy-legged perfectionist who never thought you had anything in common with Martha Stewart.

You may think you are just a high performer or an achiever, and maybe you are… But maybe you’ve also entered the land of perfectionism and you need someone to help pull you out of the mental quicksand.

Like me, you may be killing your dreams without even realizing it.

So what’s one to do?

My personal goal this year:

I’m going to make (and share) so much art it hurts.

I’m not going to wait and share the “final” version with you.

I’m going to share the PROCESS with you. 

That’s what people really want to see anyway.

We want the HGTV makeover story. We want the ugly before pictures. 

We don’t want to see Martha’s finished and perfectly set table.

We want to see the goddess Martha Stewart rise from the ashes after prison and do a wine collab with Snoop Dogg.

That’s the good stuff.

So share your art – even the unfinished, unpolished stuff.

Because the world needs more art and less perfection. 

P.S. When you feel like sharing, please share your art with me. I’d love to see it. <3