Friday night.

Oh, how I really truly love Friday night. Friday night means:

1) I can come home from work and take a nap. And not have to worry about not being able to fall asleep at an appropriate bedtime hour.
2) I can take a break from homework. Because I've been doing it all week, and I've got one more day to shove the rest onto.
3) I can do stuff I want to. Today included reinstalling programs on my laptop (I wiped the drive yet again due to issues), looking up a good week long recipe list online, and putting together a list of items for my math classes (which start in two weeks!).
4) I can stay up late! I do like staying up late. (Although I find I want to stay up late Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights... and by Friday I just want to go to sleep, so that stinks. I will stay up late tonight and get things done, like the nocturnal hamster I am during the week!)
5) I can sit back and contemplate life.

I'm on #5 now.

We've had some exciting things happen lately. You know, the house, getting unpacked, and me finding out I get to student teach at my school, and getting two whole classes all to myself, to teach in whatever way I want, and gearing up to start our photography business. Life is one gigantic creative canvas right now, and as much as I love it, it freaks me out. Sometimes there's a lot of pressure to be creative. And when it's pressing on from all sides like this, with so many projects I want to jump into wholeheartedly and design the heck out of, sometimes I get scared and want to curl up into a ball inside my fluffy down comforter because I just don't know where to start with it all. It's a little debilitating sometimes.

I want to do all these things. And I want to be great at them. But there's this teeny tiny voice in my head, wondering if maybe I can't?

I'm going to go ahead and blame it on my upbringing. According to my educational psychology textbook, kids who have perpetually excelled in school become so entranced with getting the highest grades that they find anything short of 100% completely unacceptable. They begin seeing themselves as failures... even with a 95%. And don't even thing about a grade that drops below 90! Isn't that incredibly sad... yet so true? I was one of those kids, and holy cow, that perfection stigma has followed me into adulthood.

I am not perfect. I don't need to be perfect. I need to remind myself this all the time.

It's very hard.

So that is my life contemplation for tonight. No answers. No grand realization of how I can choose to live life without an expectation of perfection looming over me. Just a confession that it's there.

Happy Friday night contemplations, everyone. Try to stay up late and sleep in tomorrow, 'kay?