Rule book metaphor

One. Two. Three. Okay. I did it. I set down the rule book. Now I just have to not pick is back up.

Let me explain some things. Some things that maybe I should have explained several months ago, some things that I’ve been coming into contact with on a weekly basis here, some things that I’ve been turning over in my head constantly throughout the last months.

There’s a certain train of thought that I keep getting stuck in. And some of my friends here will know what I’m talking about. I’ve started to refer to it as the “Brain thing.”  At some point some night I might say something that sounds a bit odd, and then when my friend looks at me with a look that says, “um, what?” I usually respond with, “yeah…my brain is doing the Brain Thing again.”

Basically that means I’m over thinking.

Over thinking one very specific thing.

And almost without fail, that thing is the interplay between the idea of failure and perfectionism.

Yeah, yeah, I know that I’ve mentioned the f-word before here and how “I’m not about that anymore guys, seriously” but, um, well, the f-word still keeps coming up. Turns out it’s harder to break a mental habit than you might expect.

As much as my time in Spain was been wonderful, as much as I have met some amazing people. I still didn’t everything I had wanted to do. For me, it’s most difficult to accept that. It’s been the most difficult for me to accept that the way I envisioned this year, and the way other people will have envisioned this year, and the way that people expect going abroad to be WILL NOT HAPPEN.

Why?

Because the things we imagine and the things that actually happen are not the same. Of course.

But for me that is so hard to accept. I only want it to be perfect. And the thought that it won’t be. The thought that I will miss things, or do something wrong, or not-the-best way drives me crazy.

I’m worried that I’ll come back with nothing to show for having gone. I’m worried that when I come back and you ask me how it was I won’t have the words, not because it was too big of an experience for normal words, but because I did not take away from it.

I feel the rule book judging me a lot. Whispering to me that I’m doing things wrong. That my judgment is horrible. I feel the rulebook in the travel stories I hear from other people who seem to know so much more than me. I feel the rulebook in the plans I make and the places I might not have time to see.

I feel the rule book all of the time.

And what I want more than anything is to conform to all the rules. And to throw the rulebook out the window and forget about it forever.

This year was never supposed to be about perfection. It was supposed to be about figuring things out, screwing up, and learning a lot.

And I don’t think I can do that with the rulebook hanging over me.

I am so good and learning things out of books and from formulas. I’m so bad at learning things from real life.

One of my most influential teachers challenged me at the start of the summer in 2012, saying “I wish you failure. I wish you failure. I wish you failure.”

And that is terrifying. But also probably even better than the rule book.

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Note: I wrote the first portion of this back in December while I was still in Spain. I only just wrote the back half of it. This metaphor is still really hard for me to articulate, despite the fact that it is a really handy and probably obvious metaphor. That's why it took me about a month to write this poorly worded explanation.