The flow

[craftyspacepirates]

**an article for my blog, declare to the nations. please check for clarity, flow, varied syntax, and grammar. thank you. feel free to disagree with the ideas posited here, too. logic matters. thank you***

Angry. Sick. Tired

When I was frustrated by the constant rejection I’d endured in middle school, I went to psychology websites and blogs to study friendship. By my first month of high school, I had a solid group of friends to hang out with.

When I was sick of being picked on by relatives for my weight, I devoted my mornings to exercise routines and spent hours after school searching for healthy dieting. Not only did I lose weight, but I even joined my high school track team so I could keep it off. I hated running, but I thought it would be worth the sacrifice.

And when all of these efforts were interrupted by the pandemic and a dreaded school transfer, I sleepwalked the last three years of high school, lost in a lonely limbo.

That loneliness did draw me closer to God, but the measuring stick I used distanced me from Him. Sinning was just another sign that I was failing God. I was angry at myself for failing and figured God was upset, too. With just more prayer, more self-control, more fasting, more chapters, I could be more.

All of this effort earned me exhaustion. In fact, the drive for perfection caused me to excel in erring. Every mistake, every heartache only proved that I was fundamentally sick, angry, and tired. Yet these same flaws were what fueled my self-improvement efforts. The cycle only broke when I looked up to Christ. My mindset shifted from wanting to be better to wanting to be more like Him. Reflecting Him gave me a more gracious standard of living, one that allowed for my humanity while guiding me towards divinity. However, the shame of my previous mistakes still haunted me.

I found a reprieve in a surprising place. Last month, I read Lightbringer, the most recent installment of Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series. Darrow, our headstrong protagonist, is facing off against his most deadly foe yet. Up until this point in the series, there was no problem he couldn’t simply outwit or force his way through by sheer might. However, this mindset mired him in mistakes too painful to push past. His circumstances became so dire that he even found religion again (in his own way), learning to yield to reality rather than remake it in his own vision. His battle against Volsung Fa represents a change from brute intensity to a sort of graceful finesse.

As their duel rages, Darrow enters a flow state. He transcends the chaos of battle and discovers an odd enlightenment amidst the battle. Darrow begins to treat the fight as a dance where each mistake is a new opportunity rather than a dead end.

When I read this passage, I was struck by how much Darrow’s mindset shift mirrored my own. Because of my past perfectionism, mistakes were something to ruminate on perpetually. Rarely did I ever let myself off the hook for errors or things that didn’t go to plan; I would even hate myself for things entirely outside of my control. I never dared to believe that something better could come from a mistake than if I had done everything “perfectly”.

This mentality simply led to burnout. While it’s true that we are meant to learn from our mistakes and improve from them, lingering guilt and anger are not healthy motivations. You cannot move on from a failure if fear of repeating it drives your actions. We are instead called to look at Christ and resemble Him as best we can. If we do fall in the process of doing so, we apologize, make amends, and move forward with more wisdom. With His grace, our mistakes can become powerful miracles. There’s always going to be situations that don’t work out, despite our best efforts. But there comes a point where we acknowledge we did the best we could with what we had.

We’ve done all we could do. And then, we drop it.

Let go.

[Beth]

@craftyspacepirates

Hello! I don’t have much critical input, but I do think this is great. I’ve also struggled with a perfectionist mindset, so I find quite a bit of this relatable. Also, I love how you related a character to your personal experience 🙂

"Believing in yourself will get you killed. Believe in the Giver. He is enough." - Glitch Society

[craftyspacepirates]

@beth-torres

Thank you, Beth! I’m glad it resonated with you.

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