Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
As a child of Russian migrant parents the phrase ‘practice makes perfect’ was drilled into me from a very early age. Recently, I’ve had to learn the harsh but very valuable lesson that in fact, practice makes progress. Every step no matter how small is a meaningful achievement, regardless of where you end up. It’s action, it’s change, it’s growth. Until now, I’ve always been trying to move from Point A to Point P(erfection) and guess what, I never got there. Because it doesn’t fucking exist.
I lost my way on the journey to ‘destination perfection’, and got sucked into a dark and horrible vortex of depression and anxiety. So now, I repeat this phrase every single day, in order to unlearn this paralysing perfectionism. Practice makes progress, practice makes progress, practice makes progress… The time I say this to myself the most is during my daily yoga practise which I’ve committed to in order to keep myself from getting sucked back in to the aforementioned vortex.
You’d think that this would be a time to relax and free my mind from daily stress but in fact it’s a battle ground between perfection me and progress me. “If your heels don’t touch the floor when you’re not doing down-face dog then you’re shit at yoga and you’re not doing it right,” I find myself saying. To which I promptly reply, ‘but they’re getting closer, don’t be so fucking hard on yourself, practise makes progress.”
So, whether it’s a short 20 min practise in my living room before work or a 75 minute sweat session at the studio after a long day, I know that it’s getting me from Point A to Point P(rogress) now, which is reassuring and brings me a lot more joy because I know that place actually exists.