Homework Habits of a Perfectionist

Ask my parents. They’ll tell you, my favorite phrase, growing up was, “I can do it all by myself.” One day, I sat, spinning the top of my Flintstones vitamin bottle, wondering, how many spins until this thing opens. My mom insisted that she help. No, I told her, I can do it all by myself, and I’ve been doing this all by myself this, college thing. In case you were wondering, I’m getting out of here with a fantastic GPA and a pretty impressive résumé, I don’t know about you, but for me, college, is great. Except for, you know, my tendency to sometimes, a lot of the time, procrastinate. Hey Facebook, hey old yearbook. Is that picture frame hanging quite right? Oh, what’s that? You want me to count the stars? Sure, just give me a long enough essay to write. Maybe one that’s worth 20% of my grade with a potential to ruin my GPA when I need a 3.7. No I need a 3.8 if I even want to put it on my résumé because I want something more than that 9-5, computer drive making just enough to eat, maybe this week I’ll survive. So I know, I know, it’s just an essay. But it’s also just my life and I don’t want to write it wrong, so I guess I’m not getting any sleep tonight. And I get it, I’m a perfectionist. trust me, I’ve googled enough on it to write a Bible on it but nothing on the self-help sites seem to help. And there was that one week I resorted to punishing myself by painting read tally marks on my biceps for every night of the week I failed myself, but how can I tell anyone this? That it took me three whole hours to write a goddamned sentence. How pathetic. I’m too old for the self harm so, how do I fix this? How do I fix this? How do I sleep? Because I’ve gotten something like 10 hours if it this week and when I’m driving late at night the snakes turn into lines I mean the lines turn into snakes sometimes I hallucinate and everything starts spinning in circles like the tops of bottles of vitamins. And I’ll start running in circles are walking in circles are crawling in circles, or just lying on the ground, treating my iPod shuffle like a magic eight ball maybe the front bottoms will tell me what to do when I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. Last night, my form started to look a lot like canvases, and I don’t own too many long sleeve shirts so before I go out and buy one more long, sleeved shirt, I thought I try something else, so this is me, finally, admitting, that, maybe, I can’t, do this, all by, myself.