The power of imperfect progress
To begin, a trip down recent memory lane…
June 2022
Fuck.
I can still barely leave the house.
A single Zoom meeting leaves me needing a two-hour lie down. A walk around the block? That’s my whole day spent.
It’s been three months since my mild case of Covid, which just never really stopped. Three months of feeling completely washed out. Three months of any demanding activity bringing on all manner of crashes, and this strange, spaced-out feeling I’ve started calling ‘headachefatigue’ (or just “HF” for short, in my journal).
At three months, I’m right on the line between what counts as ‘normal’ post-Covid challenges, and Long Covid.
I still can’t really believe it. I have no idea what happens next.
Early July 2022
I’m so sick of being sick!
My friend - who got Covid at the same wedding I did - she has it worse. Still getting fevers and other weird shit that makes the doctors just shrug.
For me it’s just the headachefatigue. The ever-present headachefatigue.
I organise my days by its waxing and waning.
I’ve never been the most active person, but this is getting ridiculous. I decide it is time to at least try some exercise.
I can’t walk five minutes without being overwhelmed with HF.
So I walk four minutes.
I borrow my girlfriend’s old fitbit to track my time and distance. I imagine its circuits confused by just how slowly I’m walking.
(‘Wait, is he moving?? What *is* this exactly?)
I don’t make it around the block, but I do make it back to my doorstep. I don’t feel great, but the HF isn’t especially worse.
Success?
Late July 2022
Why the fuck did I say yes to this scuba diving trip??
My girlfriend’s had it booked for months, with her friends. I’d just assumed I'd be too unwell to go.
But I was so sick of being sick. Two weeks out I said, ‘I’m coming!’
(And then freaked out completely.)
The dive company sends a simple fitness test, for all divers to complete at home. “Requirements: ability to tread water for three minutes, and swim 300m with snorkel and fins.”
Fuuuuck.
My friend with the really bad Long Covid, she’s coming on the trip too. We go to the local pool to do a self-conducted swim test. We both do surprisingly well.
That’s it then, we’re going. We’ll be sick buddies together, taking it one paddle at a time.
August 2022
Holy shit the dive trip was life-changing!
I come back with a whole new sense of what I’m capable of, physically, emotionally.
It’s been five months of fatigue, but something is shifting. I am hungry to push myself further.
(Slowly, gently.)
I start an ‘imperfect exercise log’.
Each day, I write down everything I do that could conceivably be considered exercise.
I start adding stretches of running to my walks, and write down what I notice as I go.
“Run walk run.
0.9km in 8 and a half minutes.
Key takeaway: jog slower! Jog at the end felt good, whereas run at the start was headachy.
When you start next run: think ‘jog slowly’. Embarrassingly slowly to begin with.”
The imperfect exercise log listens without judgement. It doesn’t care about my ‘progress’. It doesn’t mind when I don’t write any entries for a few days.
I start writing in there even on days I’m not feeling up to exercising. I’ll write why I’m taking the day off, and again it quietly listens.
Two steps forward…
At the end of the month, I buy new running shoes for the first time in years. I research just the right ones to buy.
I am so excited about this development. I’m becoming a runner! A very slow, very short-distance runner!
The shoes are a nightmare. They make my feet burn with pain, and I have to take two weeks off from doing anything.
It’s awful. I feel like I’m losing all my momentum.
But I tell my imperfect exercise journal all about it. And this somehow helps.
Devil shoes. Hissss…
February 2023
It’s now eight months since I couldn’t walk five minutes without crashing.
I just did my first 5km run.
(Like, ever!)
Those shitty shoes I bought months ago? I went back to the shop and got much better-fitted ones.
It's still a mixed bag. Some weeks I’ll run three times. Other weeks I won’t run at all.
And I’ve had to take whole long stretches off because of various other setbacks -- illness, injury.
But I keep filling out my imperfect exercise log.
I like to think it sees the incredible progress I’ve made, but that it also knows, quietly, confidently, that the progress isn’t what matters.
That what really matters is the relationship I’m building with the activity itself.
A willingness to do the hard thing, imperfectly.
A willingness to walk two minutes up the road, then turn back again, even when at first that made me feel more broken than just not trying at all.
A willingness to run embarrassingly slowly, because I didn’t want to overdo it.
A willingness to go back to my imperfect exercise log, after a week of no entries, when guilt might easily have stopped me opening it ever again.
The sweet relief of shoes that fit. (And dorky as hell running clothes.)
The power of imperfect progress
It doesn’t matter what the ‘thing’ is.
Exercise.
Taking up meditation.
Building new work or relationship habits.
Here’s what I reckon. Progress is always imperfect.
And that's why it's so damn uncomfortable.
The vulnerability of imperfection
It’s uncomfortable because it’s vulnerable.
We are so accustomed to harsh, binary judgements of ourselves and our efforts: I’m either good enough… or I’m a disgrace.
I’m either perfect… Or I’m perfectly screwed.
This actually makes sense in a way, because the ambiguity of not knowing how well we’re doing can be more excruciating than telling ourselves we’re shit and just shouldn’t bother trying.
At first, that is.
Imperfect progress means slowly building our tolerance for that ambiguity.
You slowly learn to tolerate the excruciating tenderness of trying your best and not yet knowing if your best will be good enough.
Of running embarrassingly slowly and buying the wrong shoes, and having no way of knowing if months from now you’ll have made any progress at all.
Sitting with ambiguity
Looking back over this last 9 months, I think I’ve done more than just learn how to exercise again.
I’ve increased my tolerance for sitting with ambiguity.
And you know what? That’s a powerful skill!
To sit at the edge of what you know you’re capable of, and what you secretly, tenderly wish you might be capable of (but don’t even know where to start yet).
This is a place of radical possibility. But by definition, it’s also a place of radical ambiguity. It’s vulnerable, it’s uncomfortable, it’s desperately embarrassing if heaven-forbid anyone ever read your private notes on the process.
So it takes practice.
It takes missteps.
And it takes an effortlessly non-judgemental companion, like my imperfect exercise log, who’ll be there through the good times and the bad.
Start here?
Maybe you have something important you’ve been wanting to stretch yourself for, but don’t know where exactly to start.
Here is one gentle suggestion (which you can ignore completely).
Open a notes page on your phone and start a log. Literally call it ‘Imperfect Exercise Log’ or ‘Imperfect Meditation Log’ or whatever it needs to be.
Commit to keeping an imperfect record of your imperfect attempts to stretch yourself in this space.
Include the tender insights. The things you learned that feel too elementary to share with anyone other than your imperfect log.
And include the failures, the setbacks, the ‘I don’t know why I didn’t write in this thing for two weeks but here we are’ moments.
I promise you this will feel horribly awkward and pointless and even a little embarrassing at first.
Imperfect progress always does.
But in my experience, the more awkward and vulnerable it feels, the more likely I am to get something out of the process.
And remember, it’s not about the progress!
It’s about carving out that tender space, between ‘perfect’ and ‘perfectly screwed’.
It’s about this different kind of relationship you’re building with the hard thing.
Entry by entry. One imperfect step at a time.
— Graham x
