The Real 'Mary Poppins Syndrome'

Find the freedom to be interested not interesting – and the daily grind becomes the daily game.

I was enormously disappointed when I discovered Mary Poppins Syndrome. Not disappointed it existed – I’d been using the words in my head for years – but that it had already been diagnosed as meaning the opposite of what I find it helpful for it to mean.

(Disclaimer: for once in my life I’m talking about a film version, rather than the original book.)

When Mary Poppins takes out her tape measure and reads it out like a fortune cookie (okay, now I really think about it, like a tape measure… except that it’s words rather than numbers; characteristics rather than measurements) to determine how her new charges Jane and Michael measure up, we see the accuracy: “Rather inclined to giggle; doesn’t put things away” for Jane, who duly giggles, and “Extremely stubborn and suspicious” for Michael, who denies it stubbornly and glares suspiciously. Having provided evidence of the tape measure’s accuracy, Mary Poppins measures herself. The tape measure’s readout?  “Mary Poppins: practically perfect in every way”. This is how the Banks children learn their new nanny’s name: in conjunction with the term “perfect”.

So it makes perfect (sorry) sense that when the world talks of Mary Poppins Syndrome it’s talking about the expectation or – for we mortals who cannot leap into chalk pavement pictures and whose parrot/duck umbrellas do not escort us to sit on clouds in our time off between clients – attempt at perfection. We are not the perfect [insert job, relationship, or any other self-defining element of identity]. We are not the perfect anything. Not through any failing of our own, but because there isn’t one. In art, work or life, there’s no more magnetic force to attract feeling blocked than expecting something to land on our page, or in our life, perfectly.

My ‘Mary Poppins Syndrome’, on the other hand, is the most positive element of my working (and non-working) life.

Not far from the tape-measuring incident, Mary Poppins introduces a game to Jane and Michael. She calls it “’Well Begun is Half Done’, otherwise entitled ‘Let’s Tidy Up the Nursery’.” Jane asks if it really is a game. Mary Poppins says that it depends on your point of view, because:

“In every job that must be done there is an element of fun. You find the fun and – snap – the job’s a game.”

Writer’s block needs to take only one look at the thought “perfect” to see a lifetime of welcome in a person’s head. On the other hand, the freedom to be interested rather than interesting in what we write is a lifetime of freedom. Mary Poppins is right to call it a game in as much as we can often find our way in by “tricking ourselves” into writing when we feel we’re uninspired or not in the mood. I’m not the first to point out how few jobs would take this as a reason for not showing up at the desk (most recent count: zero). Find the fun, though, and the daily grind becomes the daily game. And, by extension, the reverse is always a possibility: find the pressure or let the comparison fairies fly free (“X was younger than me when they published this/achieved that”) and everything is a slog.

“Aim to be interested not interesting” is one of my five First Draft Commandments you might have read in Your Creative Writing Toolkit. Among the others is Thou Shalt Not Edit Or Criticise Thyself: there’s a time and place for that and the first draft is neither. If you don’t have fun arriving at it, if you’re looking too soon for the approval of a non-existent audience, then the drive for perfection is going to keep you going firmly in the opposite direction.

Whenever I hear Pru Leith tell a Great British Bake-off contestant “it’s got to be perfect”, I take a deep breath and remind myself the stage we see on TV is about craft and construction, editing a final draft, not transcribing a first one from your head. That cake’s first drafts are made off screen, in the weeks and months and years of the bakers preparing themselves for the competition. Still, even in a final, edited book, perfection is not a word I’d want anywhere near a book or author I cared about. Pru uses it to mean having taken all possible care so the thing you create is as itself as it can be. That’s the phrase I use about writing when I’m looking for the same thing: is it fully itself? Where are the underbaked or overdecorated parts that need a little more time and care to find themselves again?

We are human. We are flawed. Even if our tastes were all the same, our results are not. We vary from each other and that is what makes us unique. Aim to be perfect and you’re going to lose original and authentic. I’d rather be curious, and interested, and focus on the story I’m telling myself, because that’s how a state of flow works. Perfection doesn’t allow for change, or for guards to be let down, or for every element of what it is to be a human being to be celebrated. Where there is attempt at perfection, somewhere in its shadow is shame for being imperfect.

You’ll know from your Brene Brown the thing about shame is it can’t survive empathy. What’s the one point in the film we empathise with Mary Poppins? Not just admire her, or are impressed by her, but empathise? It’s when her parrot umbrella calls her out on the (to her) embarrassing and inconveniently genuine emotions she feels and hides when it’s time to leave Jane and Michael. “Practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking,” she insists, and off she goes to her cloud, to repeat the experience with the next family the next time around.

I want something more than perfection from my own life, work and art. Something happier, and truer.

I want to acknowledge I have all the feelings any human has and so does everyone reading me. I want to remember every part of my memory and imagination is mine for the mixing. I want to get out of my own way by accepting my emotions and the causes of them are not something to be suppressed and ignored but the greatest data and greatest source of power: they are the route of empathy and empathy, after all, is why we want to hear each other’s stories. It’s also how we write our own.

If you’d like to explore the truest version of the writer you are, I’m running a four-week programme this summer. The Creative Writer is for published and developing writers alike. It’s a confidential and supportive group programme and a small number of places are still available. Read about it here.