Life Lessons

Sometimes you have to start over again.

I have decided that I'd like to learn French. I've always wanted to know how to speak the language, and took French classes starting in the second grade, all the way through to the end of high school. One might think that with ten years of instruction, a language would stick, right? One would think wrong, in my case. As much as I want to be able to speak French, and as much as I think I should have been able to maintain some knowledge of the language... I just don't know it. Not beyond a jumble of vocabulary (which are masculine and which are feminine? argh!) and verbs I don't really know how to conjugate. Don't even get me started on tenses.

So, sometimes, you have to start over again. Stop pretending you know what the hell you're doing, stop acting as though everything is perfect, just... stop. And press rewind. And start over.

It's hard for someone like me (read: perfectionist with ridiculously high expectations of herself, who literally falls into the pit of despair when those ridiculously high expectations are not met) to start over. Starting over, for me, never seems like a clean slate--it always seems like a failure.

When people talk about those silly job interview questions one always has to answer, the "what's your worst quality?" or "what's your biggest fault?" ones always come up. You're supposed to say something that sounds like a fault, but is really something positive, and people always use perfectionism (so much so that's it's become cliche and job interviewers hate to hear it, I'm told, because it's an obviously fake answer.) But what if perfectionism is your biggest fault? And it's really not positive? What if your perfectionistic tendencies actually become so debilitating you can't imagine sending novels out to agents, or going on auditions, or trying to make new friends? Because you're mortified, actually terrified--heart-poundingly, palms-sweatingly anxious of doing something....imperfect? That's perfectionism. Not the desire to do a job completely. Not the desire to put in extra hours. Not all those positive aspects a job interviewer is supposed to infer. True perfectionism is as crippling as true depression (sometimes they even go hand in hand!) or true paranoia or true anxiety or true panic attacks.

So, I've decided I want to learn French. Even if it means starting at the very beginning, with "Bonjour, madame" or "comment ca va?" or "je m'appelle Grace." It sounds like a back step, it feels like a failure, but unless I'm willing to let go of the perfectionist who holds me back at every turn, I will never know how to hold a conversation in a language I've always wanted to know.

C'est tout.