Have a Puppy. Have Two.

Sometimes, after a hard day of writing about perfectionism, all you want is a couple of puppies.
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Coming Out of Your Closet: Teyonah Parris, Adam Chandler, David Leavitt, and You

Yesterday’s piece on Betty Ming Liu’s quest for self-liberation got me thinking about authenticity. Today, I ran across stories about two people, each on their own quest for it:

For Teyonah Parris (who plays Don Draper’s secretary Dawn on Mad Men) the quest was to accept her beautiful natural hair:

“I was walking down the street with one of my girlfriends and I saw this young lady who had the most amazing, bomb twist-out. I said to my friend, “Oh my gosh, her hair is so beautiful. I wish my hair could do that.” My friend looked at me like I was crazy and said, “Uh, it would if you stop relaxing it.” I stopped and thought to myself, wow, duh. I kind of felt dumb because of course I knew my hair was naturally curly, but it had been so long since I had been relaxing. I realized that I had no real relationship with my natural hair.

“At that very moment, I decided to change that. I wanted to see what my own hair felt like because I really didn’t know. I had no clue. In the back of my mind, I always figured I could go back to a relaxer if I didn’t like it. I started transitioning for a year and a half using sew-in weaves so my transition was fairly easy. My stylist would trim off the relaxer as time went on and eventually, she cut off the last little bit of straight ends and I was relaxer-free. I finally saw my own hair in its natural state.

“And then… I cried.

“I did not know how to deal with this little afro on my head. I called my best friend crying because I did not want to leave the house. She came over and literally sat me down and said, “Teyonah you are beautiful. Your hair is amazing.” She is really the main reason why I am natural to this day. Later on, we went out in Harlem and I was trying not to feel so self-conscious. The whole day, people would come up to me and say, “Wow, I love your hair. It’s gorgeous.” I was totally shocked. The reaction I got from other people was really comforting. I know we shouldn’t look for approval from other people, but in all honestly, it really helped me see that it was really my own perception of my hair that was holding me back.

If you want to understand why hair is such a complex and emotional topic for many black women and men, Wikipedia will get you started.

Meanwhile, Adam Chandler writes about being a closeted gay man who overcompensated for his feelings of shame and powerlessness by overachievement:

I tore through middle and high school, craving perfect scores like a junkie in need of a fix. In college, I wrecked the curve for my straight classmates. Each semester, I petitioned the dean to overload my course schedule and sought the presidencies of student groups I had joined just days earlier. By the time I reached Yale Law School, where once-closeted academic superstars are like the hay in a haystack, coming out wouldn’t even have provoked a yawn. No matter. I built a wall of casebooks, hunkered down and ignored the growing hole in my social development.

Dr. Pachankis and Dr. Hatzenbuehler would not be surprised to learn that more than half the men in my randomly assigned “small group” seminar at Yale were gay. Deriving self-worth from achievement-related domains, like Ivy League admissions, is a common strategy among closeted men seeking to maintain self-esteem while hiding their stigma. The strategy is an effort to compensate for romantic isolation and countless suppressed enthusiasms. And it requires time-consuming study and practice, which conveniently provide an excuse for not dating….

But the study does show that the longer a young man conceals his sexual orientation, the more heavily he invests in external measures of success, potentially leading to undue stress and social isolation. Perhaps that explains why I recently moved to Washington, D.C., America’s most populous closet, where esteemed work abounds, promotions are frequent and ambition is in the water supply.

Another of the study’s findings is that boys who grow up in more stigmatizing environments are more likely to seek self-worth through competition. I spent my first 18 years in a rural, religious town in North Carolina, a state that recently passed a constitutional amendment barring same-sex unions by a wide margin. Now here I am, a metal detector scanning for golden prizes. That’s no coincidence, the research suggests.

(Click arrow at right to continue!)
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Dave Grohl on The Truth About How to Succeed in the Music Industry

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Sleep Deprivation and Early School Starts May Be Driving Your Teen Crazy

What a mess. Poor kids.
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Enid Blyton: Prolific Writer

The Guardian reports on a new exhibit on famed British children’s writer Enid Blyton. She produced more than 700 books, mainly for young readers, and was very disciplined both in her writing habits and her bookkeeping and business management:

But grown-up visitors will be intrigued to see how little editing Blyton’s manuscripts needed. She would cross out the odd word, insert an adjective here and there, but what was published was more or less what she battered out with two frantic fingers on the typewriter, also on display in Newcastle.

During a 50-year career, Blyton rattled off an astonishing 700-plus books, as well as 4,500 stories. The exhibition also reveals that she did her own accounts. A pencil-written ledger from 1926 entitled “work paid for” showed Blyton, then 29, earned £189, nine shillings and 11 pence in January alone. “It’s fascinating to see how organised she was,” said Kate Edwards, chief executive of Seven Stories. “She was such a shrewd businesswoman.”

Also on show in Newcastle are diaries Blyton wrote that reveal a woman with a Stakhanovite work ethic before the Russian miner had become the patron saint of grafters the world over. “Worked all day till 4.30,” she notes tersely on 25 October 1927. “Did 6,000 words today, a record for me.” In 1931 she writes: “Did story for my Page [the welcome page she wrote for each edition of her magazine]. Went for long walk with Nurse. Rested till tea. Knitted till bed.” The next day, Seven Stories adds as a postscript, Blyton gave birth to daughter Gillian.

Enid Blyton’s Account Book

If you’re a perfectionist, you might read the above and chastise yourself for not being similarly dedicated, or you might even aspire to match her productivity. It’s okay to dream big, but make sure you understand how she achieved her productivity. She obviously had a flair for spinning prose that didn’t need a lot of editing; at the same time, however, let’s not forget that she wrote children’s books, which tend to be shorter than adult ones, and also efficiently created series in which she re-used the same characters and settings. It also probably helped that there was a robust market for fiction back then–actually getting paid for one’s work is a huge motivator. But Blyton was also pretty monomaniacal about her work:

“Writing trumped all else in her life, relegating world events to a footnote. “Worked all day,” she wrote on 2 September 1939. “Germany invaded Poland today so I suppose we shall be at war tonight.”

Reminds me of something I read once about Mozart, that in all of his hundreds of letters to his father and others–letters that, in some cases, were filled with minutiae about music– he never once mentions his generation’s major upheaval, the French Revolution.

As for Blyton, if you’re not able or willing to duplicate the conditions for her prolificness, then don’t worry if you’re not able to match it. Instead, figure out what you ARE  able to reasonably achieve, and focus on that. Remember that comparisons are frequently misused in a perfectionistic way.
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What Procrastination Looks Like

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Finals Week to Netflix (Procrastination Illustrated)

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Franz Kafka’s Writer’s Block

Mason Currey, author of Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, writes about three procrastinating writers, Edgar Allen Poe, William James, and Franz Kafka:

• “In 1908, Kafka landed a position at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, where he was fortunate to be on the coveted “single shift” system, which meant office hours from 8 or 9 in the morning until 2 or 3 in the afternoon. This was a distinct improvement over his previous job, which required long hours and frequent overtime. So how did Kafka use these newfound hours of freedom? First, lunch; then a four-hour-long nap; then 10 minutes of exercise; then a walk; then dinner with his family; and then, finally, at 10:30 or 11:30 at night, a few hours of writing—although much of this time was spent writing letters or diary entries.

  In his letters, Kafka complained that his day job was holding him back, but as Louis Begley argues in his excellent biographical essay on Kafka, this was really just an excuse. Begley writes, “It is rare that writers of fiction sit behind their desks, actually writing, for more than a few hours a day. Had Kafka been able to use his time efficiently, the work schedule at the Institute would have left him with enough free time for writing. As he recognized, the truth was that he wasted time.” [Highlighting mine-HR]

For the record, never refer to your reasons for not writing as “excuses,” “complaints,” or “whines.” First, because those are negative, moralistic labels that do not add anything to the conversation: they simply shame (and, thus, undermine) you. Second, people’s reasons for underproductivity are always valid. Always! 100%. I’ve been doing this work for more than a decade and I’ve never yet heard an invalid reason.

I don’t know what happened to Kafka. Was he exhausted after his job, was his family life stressful, did he have trouble coping with his lack of public recognition, or was he just afraid to keep visiting the darkness that so often appeared in his writings? According to Wikipedia, “Kafka finished none of his full length novels and burned around 90 per cent of his own work,” which suggests a whopping case of perfectionism.

A sad case, all around. Read more