I am my own harshest critic, and I will have it no other way.  I don’t care what the chefs’ say, I don’t care about what the magazines think, I don’t care about competing with the rest of the culinary crowd.  None of these people hold a candle to my own thoughts, to my own critiques, to my own desires to make the best food possible.  I am perfectionist through and through and for whatever reason I have set the bar very high for myself.

The problem with this mindset is that nothing is ever good enough for me.  When I reach my high goals, I feel meh.  When I fall short, which happens daily because I set myself up for failure, I feel depressed and I get really down on myself.

This cycle does not work well for creativity or motivation, but regardless I am doing ok in both sectors.  Although I do wish I was doing better, I wish I was a machine of artistic creation, I wish that my magnetic fingertips were instead filled with golden talent, with shimmering iridescent paint that turns the ugly to the symmetric, the ordinary into something memorable.

I know that it all boils down to me, and that makes it more stressful/ depressing.

So, true to the diary of an optimist form, I want to focus on the positives of the day, instead of beating myself up over how I could be better.

I got to work at 8:30 and I felt like that was too late.  Silly lazy girl, you could have done better.  But fuck that.  A year ago even this feat would have been nearly impossible, it would have been a special occasion, a true self motivational feat.  I have been working second shift my whole adult life, and changing to a whole new time zone is difficult.  They talk about jet lag, but that hardly affects me after years of working at any given time, for unimaginable stretches.

For one day in my life, I am going to be proud of myself.  I am proud of the fit I threw getting out of bed, I am proud of how difficult and how defeated I felt this morning, I am proud that punching in at 8:30 was too late.  I am proud that I was brought to tears with how much I need to do at work so that I can have an enriching personal life.  Cheers and happy nonconformist weekend.