About three months ago I resolved to go on a dating and sexual moratorium. I felt my heart and mind weren't in the right place to even consider dating again after a recent breakup; it hit me harder than I'd care to admit at the time and only now I feel that I'm in a position to even consider going "back on the market" again. However, during my dating moratorium, I ended up breaking it. I never went out of my way to seek a date or put myself out there for any type of meaningful, character-building rejection, but I did sleep with someone.
So I mulled over it a while. Was it so bad that I allowed this to happen? I enjoy having sex and sex is an enjoyable part of my masculinity - my very humanity. I enjoyed the act itself. So why feel guilt or shame over it? It didn't make me a "shit" or a "louse" (as Dr. Ellis would eloquently say.) After a time I remembered the words of friends and brothers: "You don't have to do it right, you just have to do it." This permeated the rest of my feelings and my thoughts - much like my thesis; I don't have to do it perfectly, I just have to do it. So I took an index card out of my deck and wrote that phrase down. I placed it on my wall next to my other collected affirmations. Funnily enough, an identical card was already to be found. It had completely slipped my mind.
So now, at the time of writing, I'm about a half way done - 9,117w down and almost as many to go. In the mean time, I've booked myself into the Walkley Foundation Freelance Conference. I attained my yellow belt in Sin Moo Hapkido. My article for ETC, was published (although I'm yet to receive a copy.) I'm writing reviews for the Pun for this year's Melbourne International Comedy Festival. I've gone from under-employed to almost taking on too many projects to humanly handle while writing a thesis essentially full time.
Despite the nagging voice in the back of my head urging me to make everything perfect lest the world cave in around me, I have to remind myself that perfection is a state of mind and relatively relative. It's not worth attaching my sense of worth to attaining the almost impossible; I am a man and I have limitations - none more so limiting than the maladaptive beliefs that I can easily change. I can "lean" into challenge and try my best. If I that's what I can do, that's what I'll be content with.