Really Real Mental Health Post

I tend to have an all or nothing attitude when it comes to goals.

I wanted to do NaNoWriMo, but once I couldn’t write every day, that got put on a shelf and instead I’ve been blogging every single day without missing one.  This goal is a success, that one is a failure, and there is no in between.

It’s kind of a problem.

The gym is the same way.

Either I go every day, missing very few, or I just stop going.  Luckily I have a gym partner (Bat Woman) who is very similar, so we push for 7 days a week.

And then something like a holiday comes along.

And the gym decides to close early (which I wholeheartedly agree with, let them have the holiday with their families.)

And I need to start my turkey at a certain time, and flip it an hour later, and I’m doing time math and realizing we’d have to go to the gym at the butt crack of dawn and it won’t make for happy Thanksgiving dinner at our respective houses.

So we take the day off.

But then I beat myself up.

I think there’s a fear that if I take a day off, 1 day is going to turn into 2, and then I’ll quit.  I have a hard time believing I have control over that because in the past it’s been too hard for me to control.

All or nothing.

It’s a really dangerous line of perfectionist thinking.

I am really good at setting goals and really bad at follow through, and I’m working on it.  And I’m working on realizing that one day off, here or there, one mistake, here or there, doesn’t mean I need to hang the whole project up.

One missed day doesn’t make me a failure.

Because once I convince myself that I’ve failed, I just walk away and stop fighting for it.

I need to fight harder instead of giving up.