Up: [[Compulsion]] Created: 2024-10-27 When I was a child, I wanted to write the definitive encyclopedia of animals. I got as far as aardvark. All through high school and university, I started working on essays from the moment they were assigned, but didn’t finish until the last second. That was because I surrounded myself with every single book I could find on the subject I was writing about and was determined to read and make notes from them all. The same thing happened with teaching. Units took me ages to develop and never did get completed. I gave away an education library of 1500 volumes, gathered because I wanted to be comprehensive even in my own published books. Even the blog posts I wrote after retirement were exhaustively researched, and that was after an incredibly deep dive into how to succeed at blogging. Once I’d finally decided that I don’t want to write another book for publication, I’ve been able to avoid buying more books. I haven’t purchased any in five weeks and am actively working to downsize the very large collection that I do have. But it was still no more than a week ago that I finally clued in that I have zero desire to develop a comprehensive tarot resource. This decision is allowing me to reduce the number of tarot decks I own without worrying about gleaning everything from their guidebooks and taking photos of every card. Simplify, simplify. That’s what I really want to do … with everything. Today, I was rereading a passage in [[Marion Woodman]]’s *Addiction to Perfection* where she describes exactly the piles of books and notes that I’ve grappled with my whole life. She explains it as the result of the negative mother and the perfectionist father, and says it can drive a woman to eat or drink *in an attempt both to escape and to stay on the ground.* Worse, to me, than the overeating this has produced in me is the fact that creativity suffers under these conditions. No more. I am now aware and because of that awareness, I will make substantial progress.