Enter the Void
There is no detour, only through
After last week’s letter on the nakshatra Virgo, I kept returning to the theme of perfectionism and how deeply it coils itself around the Virgo rashis and nakshatras.
If you missed last week’s letter, catch up here:
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” ― Alan Watts
You wake at 6:30. You make your bed. You drink your warm water with lemon, eat your breakfast, sip your coffee. You go to work, cross tasks off your list, return home, shower, and sleep. Then you wake again at 6:30. The cycle repeats.
On the surface, your life is a portrait of discipline, but perfection has its shadows. A routine can be precise and polished while the substance of life quietly drains away. You are doing everything right, yet nothing real.
Perfectionism is not strength, it is an inheritance of fear. Centuries of religion equated labor with virtue and rest with sin. Childhood reinforced the lesson: your authentic self was not acceptable, so you created a mask to survive. What once protected you now confines you. Each move must be flawless, every expression measured. Your sensitivity is framed as weakness, your excess as shame. You begin to believe the performance is safer than the risk of being seen.
But performance is not life, it is only theater. A mask worn too long becomes a prison. It kills spontaneity, desire, and risk the very elements that make creation possible. Women have been chained by this illusion for centuries, kept obedient through the impossible demand of flawlessness. It shrinks you until you no longer recognize yourself.
I know this cost intimately. My dream since childhood has been to become a filmmaker, but I sabotaged myself for years. Art school and people around me stripped my confidence, grief hollowed me out when my father died a few years ago, and responsibility pulled me into a role I never wanted. Each time I moved toward the dream, the weight of perfection or the fear of failure pushed me back. Remaining still is a slower death. The younger version of me, who first carried this vision deserves more. And now I owe it to her to act.
“Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic feature of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
Perfectionism is a spell, and like all spells, it feeds on your belief. The way out is not found in waiting for the right time but in movement. You begin before you are ready, you allow yourself to fail, you accept the risk of being seen in your incompleteness. Delay is only fear disguised as preparation.
There is no detour, only through. When everything seems to collapse, consider whether it is destruction or construction. The unknown terrifies you because it cannot be controlled, but that is where transformation lies. To remain in the safety of order is to forfeit growth, to step into uncertainty is to reclaim freedom.
The real reward is not perfection but becoming. The journey itself is the victory. Those who hide behind the mask of flawlessness may earn approval, but they will never know freedom. To embrace imperfection, to risk being ridiculous, to rest without justification, these are radical acts in a world addicted to performance.
Life is not a polished routine or a perfect mask. It is the raw process of becoming. And only those who dare to enter it unguarded will ever touch something real.
Perfectionism hides in the shadows, these journal prompts will expose where it still controls you.
When did I first learn that my authentic self was “too much” or “not enough”?
What parts of myself have I hidden in order to be accepted?
How does perfectionism still control me today?
Where in my life am I performing instead of living?
What dream have I buried out of fear of failure or criticism?
Until next Sunday.
xx
AE
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