Things I'm Learning About Myself

Recently I've been able to put into words one of my unique idiosyncrasies.  I've known this specific quirk of mine existed, I've just never actually tried to express it before.  Allow me to explain.

My very first job was lifeguarding at a small town pool.  I was just a 16 year old with a few certifications, ready to teach kids to swim and save lives.  Turns out my job description also included teaching water aerobic classes, something I had never even heard of.  You see, small towns aren't fancy, but they like to give the townsfolk the feeling that they are.  Oh, water aerobic classes are in right now?  Let's offer them!  Who will teach them?  Just make the lifeguards.  Thus the small town offers something nice, but has teenagers teaching the course who have no idea what they're doing.  They can swim so obviously they can teach water aerobics.  Eventually I was scheduled to work the fateful shift that offered the aerobics class.  The senior lifeguard taught the class but made me get in the water to try it out.  Long story short, I loved it.  It was a game!  I got to spend an hour in the water doing all kinds of weird moves, all in the name of exercise.  Soon enough, I was the one teaching the class and it was still a game, just now I got to call the shots.  It was one of my favourite parts of working at the pool.

A few years later I got a job at a fancy schmancy pool in the big city.  Boy was I surprised to find out that to teach the water aerobics class there you had to have a specific certification that required taking two classes, completing shadow teaching hours, and scheduling a lead instructor to come and watch you teach a class to finally pass.  Since I loved teaching water aerobics it seemed obvious that I should go ahead and get this certification.  It wasn't cheap and it took a lot of time, but by the time I moved home for the summer to work at my beloved small town pool I was at the final step of completing the certification.  All I needed was to schedule a head honcho to come and watch me.  But I never did.  You see, when I came back to the place where it all started, where I first came to love teaching water aerobics, it just wasn't the same.  I had learned that essentially everything I was doing before was wrong.  But when I taught the class the right way, it just wasn't fun anymore.  I've realized the best way to express this trait is:

Knowledge is prison

I've found that when I come to love or really enjoy something, I want to learn more about it.  I gobble up everything related to it.  Yet oftentimes this influx of knowledge takes away that magic spark of genuine interest and replaces it with a rigidity and need for perfection that burns me out.  It's happened several times before and will probably continue to happen throughout my life.  In fact, blogging is a prime example of the "knowledge is prison" phenomenon.  So called "professional bloggers" have made up all these "best practices" that the perfectionist in me is dying to follow.  But the reality is that editing pictures to be the same size or any other blogging hocus pocus robs me of that pure, unadulterated joy I feel while typing out what I'm thinking.  And when I'm robbed of that, I just don't like it or want to do it anymore.  I realize the prison I'm referring to knowledge as is completely constructed by me.  I can't help it.  It's the perfectionist in me.  If I can't do it the right way, I just won't do it.  It's an awful way to approach life.  It's how I approach this here blog.  In fact, that last post I wrote in five minutes was an embarrassment to post, but I made myself do it as a way to stick it to my need for perfection.  And I want to keep doing that.  I want to break out of prison.