Building websites and other personal issues

L.C. Hill

“This isn’t just building a website,” I exclaimed over our lunch break. We’d spent the morning writing like we do every Saturday at the library. We had crossed our fingers entering our favorite restaurant nearby that there would be a table. It’s always busy and we were running a few minutes late. “It’s a whole lot of personal issues, too,” I admitted over the noisy room.

They laughed, of course. Who wouldn’t laugh?

But, it was true. I hadn’t done anything so frustrating in years. It isn’t that it’s particularly hard to build a website these days. Well, for someone in their thirties. Or, even better yet, for someone in their twenties as I once was. Back then I was writing HTML code to design websites. Now, in my mid-forties, I couldn’t even figure out how to manipulate a template in WordPress. And that was frustrating.

I’m the type of person who is happy only when she knows everything about something. I would rather get a degree in WordPress—I really need someone to create that—than take a learning journey for a couple of weeks, bumbling along as I go and celebrating every little victory. Normal people do that. Normal people are okay not knowing some things and then conquering them anyway, no matter how long it takes.

It does not help that my ability to learn has diminished as I’ve gotten older. I hate to admit it. I hate that it’s a thing, but it’s definitely a thing. I noticed it for the first time when I went back to school for my bachelor’s degree in my late thirties. My first class was College Algebra. For as many years as I had spent in school taking endless classes—because of this endless need to know everything—I had somehow avoided the general education math credit. But it would be no problem, I thought. I was a whiz at algebra in high school. I remembered very clearly my fellow students struggling whereas I understood everything. Homework was almost fun. I would even wait until the last minute to pump it out because why spend precious after-school time on something so easy? As a thirty-eight year old, however, I cried every single day. I not only couldn’t grasp the concepts I once didn’t have to spend any brain cells on, I was mostly upset because I remembered how easy it once was. I was convinced my brain had turned to mush in my ripe old age.

Apparently, it had. I was faced with memories of easily designing websites with code almost twenty years ago. There were no drag-and-drop options. If I wanted a color change, there were no drop-down menus. I had to find the RGB on that baby. And I did. But not this time. I couldn’t figure out the drop-down options on one of the templates I tried, so I abandoned it completely. It kept reminding me that I was now stupid where I had once been almost bored because it was so easy.

I eventually found a template that I managed to wrangle into a website and, I’m happy to say, it’s better than the one I abandoned. My girlfriends laughed—as they very well should have since I was being ridiculous—but this isn’t just a website. It’s a triumph over deep-seated personal issues of perfectionism. And just like I abandoned that template and its stupid drop-down menu issues, I am embracing this forum as a place to abandon my issues with perfectionism.

So, I offer this space to you as a place to view vulnerability, imperfection, and my mushy old lady brain.

Enjoy!