Getting past perfectionism

Lately I've been really wanting to take up doing my nails. I think it looks neat, and I really love all the cool things you can do with nail art and stuff. I started watching nail art videos initially because one popped up on my feed, and I found watching the artist go through the motions just really enjoyable to watch (a bit ASMR-y, maybe) but now I really want to try it.

But I'm frozen by knowing I won't be very good to start with. Obviously youtube nail artists aren't putting out their dross manicures but I know, in my head, all I really need to start is a base coat, colour coat and top coat, and just a couple of extra tools like a cutical pusher and nail oil. But I just can't get past it. All I can think is "Oh god what if I am crap at it and I've wasted more money.". I don't have a track record, as it were, for picking up 101 Hobbies and then dropping them as soon as they get hard, but it just paralyses me. What if I do it wrong? What if I do badly? It doesn't help that I like to be prepared so I end up researching so much, and now my brain is like "Well is there any point you'll never be that good", and end up thinking you nedd 500 products, even though I know that the only people that "need" all that stuff are people who make a career out of it or have been doing it for years and have just accumulated it.

AND IT'S STUPID. I JUST WANT TO PAINT MY DAMN NAILS WITH A DEGREE OF SKILL. It's all sat in my amazon basket, but I just can't bring myself to purchase. The money isn't a problem, and it's not an expensive hobby, really.

I wonder, without getting too psycho-analytic about an intensely low stakes problem, if it is linked back to the fact my mother used to refuse to pay for me to do stuff as a kid, if I wasn't good at it, and it would always be Spanish Inquisition style questioning about whether I really wanted to do it or whether I had just seen it once and thought it was interesting.

Anyway. Does anyone have any tips for getting past this mental block? I've noted it before in other areas of my life, but strangely not the big ones. It's always comparatively low stakes stuff.

Submitted October 25, 2019 at 08:55AM by skunky_x https://ift.tt/32KGixm