The Wayward Minds Collective

I’ve always been a perfectionist.

Group projects in school  would always annoy me because I’d feel that my partners were never invested as much as I was. 

They weren’t concerned about success. Or what I thought it was.

There were many nights that I’d stay up in a dark room, hunched in the corner of my parent’s basement, blasting my ears with music from Mario Kart to keep myself awake as I wrote just one more paragraph. Fixed just one more part of my digital painting. Just one more assignment I wouldn’t have to work on tomorrow. My eyes would burn from the brightness of the screen, always giving me terrible migraines. My vision would begin to double from lack of sleep, and I’d take an eye break by looking at something other than my screen.

My cat would be asleep on my desk, curled on top of a Victoria’s Secret blanket. He would always seem to be floating, levitating off of it– smirking at me as if he knew something I didn’t.

Or maybe it was my eyes.

And without fail I’d get the grade I had wanted. It was always a hollow victory. Even as looked at the letter, I would feel that it was mocking me with indifference over the hell I went through to get it. 

Letters have a consciousness of their own. The ones that you put next to it influence their outcome, of course, but there’s something about when a letter stands on its own– it has a certain weight to it that words cannot replicate. 

And the worst of these jaded letters is “A”.

I’ve been done with school for a while now. I’m ambitious, too ambitious, with no direction, or letters to nod in vacant approval of my goals.

Whenever I sit down to work, the familiar demon of unworthiness plagues my mind. Torching my spirits with feelings that whatever I do won’t be good enough. That no one will care or relate with my frequencies, with the vibration on which I create.

 It would get so painful to the point where I couldn’t bring myself to work. Where do I start?  How did I do? What do I do next? There would be no syllabus or rubric or evaluation after to tell me. How would I know if what I was doing was good enough now that there’s no one there to tell me? 

In the form of that grotesque letter?

 I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s intentional. The education system was not created to foster and develop the creative mind. It wasn’t designed to spark the divine inner calling within us that leads us to our purpose in life. Its a tribunal of a society dedicated to mediocrity, and the pummeling of any individuality that doesn’t fit within the status quo.

Education has certainly opened a lot of doors for me, and I do not doubt that there’s more than a few people who are fighting to obtain it. However, I can’t help but wonder where I would be if I hadn’t been subconsciously conditioned to constantly seek someone’s else’s approval.

Or perhaps the pursuit of acceptance through others is something that goes deeper than formal education, but the environment of it fanned the flames to burn brighter. 

 I refuse to get burned anymore. 

I’m reclaiming my individuality, but also accepting the role that I play as part of the collective human experience.  

I encourage others to do the same. Whatever that means for you. 

For me, it means releasing that fear of no longer being good enough, releasing the expectation that someone will be around the corner to give me the validation to continue pursuing my creative endeavors.

I release myself of needing permission to tell my truth.

Amen. 

—A