To edit, or not to edit. That is the question!

So, If you are one of the six people who have read my blog, you are probably familiar with my standard disclaimer.  It is essentially this:

In an effort to avoid my own ADHD perfectionist tendencies, I choose not to edit, proofread, reread, obsess, ruminate,  hyperfocus, and generally get all mental about these posts.  I generally ask for forgiveness for typos, misspellings that spell check misses and the occasional gramatical mistake.

My incredibly helpful father (a former high school English teacher) and my helpful and very “detail oriented” mother (who used to be in publishing) have encouraged me to have someone edit my postings.  I think they are worried that these posts will “be out there forever” and that it will reflect poorly on me to allow such small mistakes to exist.  (By the way, they will both be reading this… how else would I have six whole people reading my blog?)

If and how I edit my blog is a really fundamental question.  Perfectionism is a serious issue that most of us ADHD’ers deal with on a daily basis.  We often drive ourselves and those around us crazy by obsessing over at best semi-important details in an unrealistic and unproductive pursuit of some kind of perfection.  (Perhaps I’ll do a whole entry on that soon.)

My fear when I started this blog was that I wouldn’t have the follow through to post regularly.  I didn’t want to post unimportant things just to be blogging.  I truly want this to be a forum for what I have learned and what I continue to learn on a daily basis about how to manage life with ADHD.  I made a conscious decision to post my disclaimer and just hammer out my thoughts, because I knew the biggest enemy of my follow through was perfectionism.

The whole idea of this blog is to help others with ADHD in two ways.  First, I try to offer real suggestions on how to manage your ADHD.  But, I also try to draw from my own life and experience, to be somewhat of a mentor and role model.  If I can show other ADHD’ers that I can get out of my own head and actually write new posts semi-regularly, I think that is much more powerful than proving to them that I can occasionally post a flawless essay on something or other.

Honestly, this has been in my blog’s draft folder for about a month.  I’ve been giving it some serious thought.  I’ve decided that I’m going to give my dad admin privileges so he can edit any active post, if he wants to.  But otherwise, I’m not going to worry about it.  If something doesn’t get edited, I’m going to continue to be okay with that.  And if someone reads something before it gets edited, so be it.

I feel that my ideas and my content are strong enough that they can sustain a few typos.  If anyone thinks otherwise, it is their loss.  And, again, believe it or not the typos go a lot further towards my feeling like a good ADHD role model than any content could. Remember, DONE well is always better than NOT DONE perfectly.

Leave a Reply