Blog #1- Shitty First Drafts- A Response

As a perfectionist, I have a hard time writing anything down until it forms in my head in a clear, coherent way. I get anxious when I can't find just the right way to say something, and I usually end up staring at the screen for a while… a long while (I’ve stared at the screen for at least three minutes already while trying to type these two sentences, if that tells you anything). Once I’m on a roll however, my fingers can’t keep up with my brain and I lose track of where I was going and revert back to trying to figure out what to say. I blame society. Everything has to be perfect, everything has to be the best work you’ve ever done, or at least that's the expectation for us high achievers. They see us do well once or twice and then we’re labeled and branded, and to fail those expectations is like killing a puppy, at least when it come to my experience. It’s crap honestly. Its the reason I leave everything until the last minute and really late at night when I lose more of my inhibitions and become a bit more creative and everything seems better than it is. Then I can turn it in without feeling like the biggest failure ever. (If I had known getting straight A’s in Kindergarten and First Grade would lead to a lifetime expectation, I probably would have strived for some B’s and had a lot less anxiety and stress in my life). Anyways, the idea of writing a shitty first draft of whatever comes to mind makes my skin crawl. It seems like an extra step to an already painful process, especially when I usually just write a relatively okay first draft then just brush it up and add some vocabulary the second time around. But I think I’d like to start trying it (honestly though, I'm really lazy and I probably won’t want to revise that mess, so I’ll just continue with my ingrained perfectionist ways), if only for this class. Anne Lamott seems to know what she's talking about, and she's funny so that always makes me more willing to try something. I definitely think she's right when she says you have to start somewhere though, and other methods I’ve tried with writing haven't really worked, so lets see how this goes. (Disclaimer: being a lazy, procrastinating perfectionist if really the worst, I would not recommend, and I’m terrible at writing responses, especially if there is no prompt, so I apologize for this mess).