Hi, my name is Eva, and I’m a perfectionist.
It’s been 25 days since my last journal entry, and before sitting down to write this essay, I drank two Stella Artois and took a hit of my “Pure Beauty” preroll. I was hoping this would be my last time checking into The Artist’s Way, or as I like to call it, the Betty Ford Recovery Center for Blocked Artists. But old habits die hard. And if there’s one thing I’ve mastered, it’s falling off the wagon.
My first serious attempt was August 4th, 2023. It lasted a week. I was focused, consistent, ready to change. Then I missed a few morning pages, the daily stream-of-consciousness ritual at the heart of The Artist’s Way program where you fill three pages of your journal to empty your brain before the day starts, clearing out the noise so your real voice has room to speak. So I quit. Told myself I’d start back up once I felt ready.
But that’s the recurring theme in my life. I never feel ready.
Perfection has become my favorite excuse, a way to delay, disguise, and abandon things before they have the chance to get bad. Or worse, to get real. No, I can’t start a podcast yet, I need the perfect title. No, I’m not ready to write a book, I need an audience first. “You’re such a good storyteller,” people tell me. “It’s your gift.” Thanks, I reply, half-believing them. But I need to take eight billion more classes before I could write or direct anything of my own.
At some point, my “I will once it’s perfect” excuse stopped sounding like ambition and started sounding like avoidance.
Maybe, deep down, the reason I don’t pursue my dreams is because somewhere along the way I stopped trusting my taste. When I was younger, I wrote as if my life depended on it. I shared my stories with anyone willing to listen. But lately, since the pandemic, really, I started to believe that someone else, somewhere else, is more qualified to decide when I’m ready. When I’m good enough. When what I have to say is worth sharing.
One of the first things you learn in recovery is how to quiet that nagging, incessant voice. Or at least, how to recognize it for what it is. It’s not intuition. It’s not discipline. It’s fear. Judgement. Noise.
For me, safety looks like remaining unseen. Not failing, just… not fully trying. Not exposing myself. Not finding out what happens if I actually commit.
Because the real question isn’t what if I don’t try hard enough? It’s what if I did?
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My original plan for this essay was week four of the program: media deprivation. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Seven days, no reading, no TV, no algorithm, the Artist’s Way’s version of a cleanse for your attention span. I’d write about what my taste buds were craving after a week out of the matrix.
But even the thought of TikTok withdrawal sent me into a self-sabotaging spiral. I watched more Keeping Up With The Kardashians in the last month than in my entire life. And the voice came back, louder: The algorithm informs your taste. You don’t inform the algorithm.
Thankfully, I caught it. Because that voice isn’t mine.
What the hell do you know about my taste?
I bet you don’t know that the first thing I notice about people is their hands, the clean nails, the brass rings, the delicate wrists. That Patti Smith’s Just Kids is the soundtrack to my life. That I can listen to Nina Simone and Eydie Gormé cover to cover in a single evening and feel just as full with each new song, because it was never about genre. It was about what each artist dared to tell.
You don’t know that I can devour two films a night and still feel hungry for more. That my curiosity, my appetite for human connection, sits at the center of everything I do. And that hunger is the thing that has quietly shaped my taste, long before any algorithm ever could.
So maybe that’s the whole point of checking into The Artist’s Way. Not finding my taste. Not refining it. Just trusting it.
Trusting that who I am is enough. That a story informed by my own lived experience will be richer, fuller, and more meaningful than anything gathered from a For You page.
I say this now, but I’ve got eight weeks left in recovery.
Let’s see where trusting my taste takes me.
