As I make my way through the start of high school, I am becoming more familiar with myself; strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, and learning habits. These traits of mine effect my work, my mindset, and my overall well-being.

I always find myself with strengths and weaknesses that are very similar, like my perfectionism. Being a perfectionist helps me stay motivated to work on projects to my full extent, but becomes a problem when I start to “care too much”.  This happened to me when I was working on my Crusades project in humanities. I had to create a learning resource about the crusades, which seems pretty straightforward. But not for me. I had reached a point where I was writing paragraphs on paragraphs until I was satisfied with my work. I made many slideshows, with very detailed hand drawn images, which I spent so much time on, until I was finally happy with it. This caused me spending long hours at night, causing tried or emotionally drained. I look back at this project, and am happy with how it came out, but disappointed of my proses to create it. I still do this for lots of projects, but I am slowly getting better at not putting such high expectations on myself, or “caring a little less”, in my mind. 

I still need to appreciate my perfectionism, though. Like I said earlier, it can keep me motivated to work on projects as best as I can, even when they create challenges, or I come to a problem. I noticed this when I was working on my exhibition project, Pandoras Box. I got to create a box which had an artifact from the movie “Avatar”, which revealed something about our society (racism, corporate greed, humans v nature, etc). I had a very difficult idea, which was to create a tree which was important in Avatar, after it had been knocked over. I wanted it to be hanging, and look exactly how I envisioned it. I ran into lots of problems during this project, like what my tree artifact would be made of, how I would hang it, or how I would make a box(frame in this case) that was strong enough to hold a tree. In a different world, I would have given up, but because I feel this need to continue, like I know if I try hard enough it will work, I persisted. I came up with ideas, tried different things, asked other people for help. I still worried, and probably spent more time then necessary, but in this case, I was much more grateful for my perfectionism.    

It’s funny to me that I didn’t talk about me being a perfectionist in my learning plan, because I have been one for a very long time, and have been aware of it. I know this is something I have to really work on, because it is affecting me negatively more then positively. I want to start coming up with ways that I can balance my perfectionism,  so I can still be motivated and passionate, but without the stress and pressure I give myself. When I get to my tPOL, I hope I can say say that I have done at least 1 project  where I didn’t drive myself crazy trying to make it the most perfect thing in the world.