Saturday, July 13, 2013

Autistic and perfectionistic

My whole life I've been an extreme perfectionist. This can be a good thing but it can also be very frustrating. When I was in school for example and we had to study for a test, I always made a review of the pages in the book we had to study. This is actually a really good thing to do before a test. An advice for other students, when you write a review of what the book says you will remember it a lot better and faster. But in my case, I was never satisfied with my review, and the way I wrote it down. I always wanted to do it shorter and cleaner and less 'chaotic'. So even before I wrote about 6 sentences I already crumbled up the piece of paper and started all over again. The whole floor was already covered in crumbled pieces of paper after half an hour. Of course this always took a lot of time. The same thing happened with my notebooks in school. We always had to keep a journal with biology, and I always kept it extremely clean and perfect, until somebody accidently threw water over it. I found this very difficult to cope with.

It always find it very difficult to start with something. For example, I always love to write and buy nice journals for my writings. But then my journal stays empty and I don't do anything with it because I'm too affraid to mess it up. I still have a chemistry set somehwere which I have never ever used because I wanted to keep it perfect. I knew that if I would use the chemicals in that set that I would run out of it, so I just didn't touch it.

Of course I'm trying to get better with all of this, and I think I am if you compare it with years ago. But when I do write in a nice journal I always do it with a pencil first and when I'm satisfied I use my pen. And then I'm not talking yet about how long it takes me to find the right pen for the kind of paper in this journal. But at least this is better than a totally empty journal isn't it?

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