'Make new mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before.'

Two posts in a row that begin with quotes from Neil Gaiman. What can I say? Mr G makes a lot of sense.

The above is an excerpt from his New Year's wishes for 2010, in which he also says:

'...if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.'

Over the last year I've had no option but to follow Neil's example.  Some of those adventures have turned out well, others less so. I've learned a lot about myself, the most important lesson being that I have only a journeyman's grasp of how much more I need to learn and would like to experience.

Like most human beings I've made mistakes, but not nearly enough of them. The phobia of messing something up, or appearing less than infallible by asking for help when I need it, has prevented me learning and growing as I might have wished. That all consuming dread of getting it wrong (gasp!) accounts for why, among other things, I've struggled to write the same book for a decade.

There is nothing whatsoever wrong with wanting my work, my life or my relationships to be as good as they can be. For that to happen, I need to relinquish a degree of control and give them the freedom to develop naturally. Striving for perfection is counterproductive to that for many reasons. It stifles growth, makes unscaleable mountains out of the tiniest molehills and, left unchecked, breeds the sort of fear that makes even the simplest task seem impossible. I know this to be true because, against Freidrich Nietzschze's advice, I have gazed long into that abyss and allowed the abyss to gaze back into me. At the height of my anxiety I forgot how to sleep, I developed a nervous twitch in my right hand that spread all the way up my arm and I mastered the art of saying 'nothing'sthematterwhatcouldpossiblybethematterandanywayIdon'twanttodiscussit' without moving my lips. My state of mind reached the nadir it did because I told no-one what I was going through and I wouldn't have accepted help if it was offered. For all my talk of mistakes, this is not one I care to repeat. It sabotaged my Masters degree in 2004/5 and turned what could have been an enjoyable and rewarding time into a minefield of self doubt and self deception. That was a far greater mistake than any creative left turn I might have taken while writing. With the benefit of hindsight I can identify, and find the courage to share, the reasons why it happened and stop one of the darkest chapters in my history repeating itself.