The joy of being TERRIBLE

as a recovering perfectionist

About a month ago, my middle kid asked if I would play Fortnite with them. I groaned internally because I've played Fortnite before when the kids were younger. In the pre-teen years, I made a point of always trying out the games they wanted to play because it meant I could talk about it with them or understand what they were excited about/the terms of the games etc, and I just could never get my head around building in Fortnite. It was all go, go, go! And before I had time to figure out what the hell I was doing, I was dead.

However, there is a Zero Build option now, and so I was like, okay, fine. I will play with you.

Shooting games are not where my strengths lie. In fact, I'm just plain bad at them. I made exceptions for certain games as long as there is good story, but I will never forgive myself for getting stuck near the very end of Uncharted 1 when I accidentally saved the game at a place where I could not go back to get more ammo (before I realized one should always have MULTIPLE save points), and I had bugger all and there are a million Descendents ready to eat my face off.

I'm just never finishing that game. *shrugs*

After weeks of playing Fortnite almost daily I still struggle to know where people are firing from at times and can't track all the things, I've only just got to grips with what the different guns do, and I can only kill a couple of people per round. BUT I am having so much fun.

This is not something I ever thought you'd hear me say.

I look forward to my hang time with the middle kid so that we can load up the game and get a few rounds in. I've even started looking at quests and stuff, interacting with the wider world within the game.

And I splurged and got the Battle Pass, because I was so sick of being a default avatar in the game. I wanted to be something more ME.

Anyway, the whole point of this post is that I've found incredible joy in being really bad at something. I have embraced the suckage and feel absolutely no shame about a) how bad I am or b) how much I'm enjoying being bad.

Which is not to say that I'm not trying to improve - but as a perfectionist who is trying really hard to free herself from always having to do the best, there is something beautiful in just being really bloody terrible. In letting that be okay.

It wasn't until I listened to a book called How to be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists by Ellen Hendriksen that I realized just how much perfectionism has been controlling my life. It prevents me from even trying things if I think I might be bad at them. It made me look back at my life and realize that I denied myself a lot of joy for fear of being bad or worse than I was the last time I did something.

Examples of this: in my early teens I was a top archer in New Zealand in my age bracket. Consistently top 3 in the country. I really enjoyed Archery, I was good at it even before I got glasses at 15 - I was short sighted, so you can imagine how much I improved AFTER I got glasses. Now and then I think about picking up a bow, but perfectionism prevents me from doing that. What if I sucked? What if that was my peak? What if I could never be good again?

Does it actually matter if I'm good, though? My brain screams YES, especially because I WAS good before so therefore, I should always be good and if I can't be good, I should just never do the thing.

This also applies to medieval sword-fighting, horse riding, and no doubt many other things. Naturally, I think the pressure to be good at something I was once good at is more intense, but that same pressure applies to almost everything. If I am not capable of being good at a thing, what is the point in even trying? This hinders me in my author career as well because I find 'selling' very hard, and so I avoid it. Ads? Forget about it. Marketing? Kill me now. I don't know about these things, and even though logically I know I COULD learn, my brain says I am going to be bad at them, so I'm not even going to try.

...

Yeah, that's working SO well for me /sarcasm.

But with Fortnite there is no weight on it. No financial loss. No pressure. It doesn't matter if I'm bad at it. I can still gain XP and unlock skins. It's fast paced and I can die and die and die again, and there is no cost, no consequence. It literally doesn't matter.

It's very freeing.

And I feel like that energy is something I need to bring to other areas of my life.

What if I could find a way to let go on the perfectionist reins and just accept being bad? What if the true cost of NOT doing the thing is actually higher than the cost of trying?

*shudder*

I am both horrified at the thought of being bad AND at the thought of all the ways I've restricted, controlled, and made my life smaller due to my fear of being awful at a thing.

Fortnite is, weirdly, helping me work through this. Every time I die in a new dumb way (and trust me, there have been some hilarious deaths) and my body doesn't go into a shame response shows me that it's okay to suck. That the consequence of failure is not actually life threatening. That I can fail and try again, and again, and again, and still be okay. I can still reboot and give it another shot.

Of course, there are some consequences for failure in my writing career - a book could bomb (but that's happened, and I didn't die), I could be terrible at ads and lose money (I also didn't die when this happened, though the shame spiral was huge, and I've been too afraid to try again) and so many other things - but I genuinely feel like Fortnite is helping me to kill the shame of failure and to actually, weirdly, find joy in it. I can laugh at myself (gods, I am SO serious when it comes to me, this is actually a real relief. Thank fuck my kid doesn't get TOO mad at me when I die). I feel excited at the opportunity to try again.

Fortnite is still fast paced in general, much faster than writing and publishing, but I genuinely believe that it's helping me in ways I could never have predicted when I picked up my PS4 controller. It's a joyful game for me, and I'm excited to apply some of that newfound joy in failure to the rest of my life. I WANT to experiment, and my brain is bubbling with thoughts of how I can do that - I want to see the results of those attempts no matter what they are and then throw myself at the problem again.

At the pace of a chronically ill person, that is.