Our worst qualities are often just the other side of our best qualities. I've been thinking lately about how necessary persistence has been in my life, and yet how annoying it can make me.
If there's a task you're avoiding but need to accomplish, I'm a good person to ask for accountability. I've helped multiple people reach goals (sometimes my goals for them!) through the force of my nagging. By nagging myself, I've been able to pursue my own ever-shifting goals. And yet, you can imagine how annoying it can be to receive a text or email from me when I'm trying to make something happen.
In recent years, I've particularly focused on writing and submitting fiction, where an annoying level of persistence has been mostly beneficial. I'll keep asking and waiting and asking some more until I get an answer. If I receive a rejection, which I often do, then I'll send off another request somewhere else. I'll try a different venue or a different angle. Of course, I couldn't do this unless I valued my own work. On the other hand, I'm not sure I could have come to truly value my own work without my obsessiveness.
Fortunately, I rarely get obsessed with particular accolades. With writing, I've become obsessed with learning to produce the best work I can (of the strange variety that I produce) and with finding the appropriate readers for it. I've undertaken a long course of trial and error to make progress in this area, and it’s only just beginning. As long as I'm alive, expect to see me doing a bunch of different stuff that doesn't make immediate sense. I don't know how to get anywhere on a straight path, and anyway, I enjoy chasing white rabbits.
Frankly, I like this about myself, and YET I'm sensitive about annoying people because I know how I am. Try talking to me when I'm in the grip of a compulsive thought, for example, and I'll ask you the same question twenty times in a row.
If you open up Twitter or whatever your chosen social media is, you'll find your feed crowded with obsessive people. If it makes you feel any better, we annoy each other and ourselves, too! But again, it's the other side of the coin of what we like about ourselves. I wouldn't be here pursuing my eccentric plans if I weren't like this. I would have given up a long time ago.
It's good to seek balance when possible. I can get impatient with people who are hesitant to move, and I would like to be more patient. The other side of being more still and hesitant is that such people can be very supportive and stable, peaceful and present. My life has been richer for them.
I have had people in my life who nagged me, and I know they can be hard to deal with. On the other other hand, they've forced me to get up and do things I wouldn't have done otherwise. My life has been richer for them.
I suspect that the most difficult path is to be one kind of person stuck pretending to be the other kind of person. For example, an obsessive person who refrains from acting (maybe because of shame or perfectionism) until they feel like they're going to explode. They might appear uninterested because they're avoiding their own obsessions and creative outlets, but really they're full of a fire that's burning them up inside. If you feel this way — start creating things! Regularly and immediately!
Similarly, it must be hard to be a calm, stable person who has to pretend to be obsessive. It certainly isn’t necessary to be obsessive to produce great work. In many ways, chill people seem happier than obsessive people, and they are brilliant at their own pace, on their own time. They’re worth waiting for.
We all end up in the same place anyway, but we’re stuck with our own personalities along the way.
As always, these are my own scattered thoughts, and I'd love to receive some insights from others. Back with more later!
I'm so similar that it's like you wrote this about me.