There Is No Ready

When I am cleaning my house, my family goes on full alert mode.

Like, watch the fuck out. Mom’s cleaning. You are gonna get in trouble.

I can’t help it. When I am cleaning, I go through my house thinking, you pigs. Who lives like this? Who leaves their shit out all over the place?

I clean from a place of rage. 🤦‍♀️

Hi! I’m Stacie. An Enneagram 1. The Reformer. AKA a perfectionist.

Basically, I look at the world through a lens of: What is wrong? What is inefficient? What is not up to standard? And then I make it my mission to fix it.

So imagine me cleaning and, yeah, you might want to get out of the house.

But I am working on a shift there.

A while back, it hit me.

I don’t actually like the process of cleaning. But I do prefer living in an environment that is clean and orderly.

And that kind of environment requires continual work.

There is no point where my house becomes CLEAN and stays that way.

Trust me, very few things make me rage more than watching someone walk into the house I just cleaned with grass clippings on their shoes.

You wanna see a come apart? Come on over.

But a while back I realized:

A clean house wasn’t a place to get to.

Keeping it that way was just something I was going to have to keep doing.

And weirdly, accepting that made me hate doing it less.

Ok, still a work in progress.

But the cleaning I do day to day? There isn’t anger behind it anymore. I do it for me. I embrace the process because I love how it feels to live in a clean house.

Yesterday I read these words:

“True mastery isn’t about reaching an impossible endpoint of perfection; it’s about loving the endless process of perfecting.”

And I was like, whoa.

Not because of my house.

Because of my life.

I have spent years waiting to feel ready enough to do the work I really want to do.

To talk about this stuff.

Teach what I am trying to learn.

Write the book.

Build the program.

Develop the app.

Share my shit and maybe help other people through it.

I’ve spent years studying this stuff because I love it. I’m applying it to my own life and I’m seeing changes. And I believe it’s important enough that it can help other people.

But quietly, on the side, I’ve also been trying to figure out what exactly “this work” is while waiting until I feel qualified enough to actually share it.

I need to learn more.

Read another book.

Maybe get another certification.

Then I’ll be ready.

And yesterday it hit me.

Ready is my clean house.

It’s this place I think I’m eventually going to get to where everything is finally in order.

Except even if I got the next certificate that made me feel ready, there would be something else standing there calling for my attention.

Because there is no ready.

Just like there is no clean.

There is learning. Practicing. Growing. Fucking it up. Seeing something I didn’t see before. Trying again.

Maybe mastery isn’t getting myself to a place where there’s nothing left to work on.

Maybe it’s loving the process enough to keep doing the work.

And maybe I don’t have to finish learning how to be human before I’m allowed to talk about what I’m learning.

Maybe I can just learn to be human out loud.

Still learning.
Still coming home.

— Stacie