Weddingbee Blog

Does anyone else suffer from perfection-induced paralysis? You know, how you want something to be so beautiful, so right, so…so…perfect that you can’t actually take any action toward starting it? This happens to me in SO many areas of my life, from school to work and now to wedding planning. I actually had a professor in law school take me aside at one point and tell me that my desire to make everything perfect before declaring it finished was actually a huge hindrance, and it was holding me back in her clinic. Because I so badly wanted to make sure that whatever I was doing was perfect, half the time I couldn’t even start something because I told myself that there was no way I could make it perfect, so what was the point? This ultimately meant that many things took me much, much longer to accomplish, mainly because I just couldn’t get myself to start them.

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I’m now seeing this happen a lot with wedding tasks, especially as we’re getting closer and closer to February. There are so many projects and ideas that I have, and many of them are only in my head because I don’t know how to start them. And I figure if I don’t know how to start them, then how could I possibly know how to finish them?

Yes, I understand that this isn’t the most healthy internal dialogue to be having, but it is something that has been a struggle for me for a long time. What I have learned from all of this is that ultimately when I have a project staring at me I just have to start. I wanted to create our invitations, but I didn’t know how? Well, I had to open up a Word document and just start playing with things until something looked good to me. That wedding Facebook idea that I talked about here? Yeah, I haven’t done anything more on that because I don’t know how I want the finished product to look. Are you seeing the ridiculousness here? Don’t worry, I am too.

Luckily, whenever I get into this paralysis mode, usually something eventually shocks me out of it. Strangely enough, this time it was losing a bunch of stuff on my dead laptop (I didn’t say it was always a good event that shocks me out of my head), but I finally realized (again!) that I don’t have to know how it will all work out right this instant. I just need to start something and see where it goes. If I hate it, I can start over. But more than likely there will be something I like about it, and I can build from there.

So that’s what I’ve been working on now—just starting the many projects that are in idea form and seeing where they take me. Does anyone else ever get this way? Or am I alone in my ridiculousness?