is your perfectionism even really helping?

Letting go of perfection will not make you lose control of yourself. Perfection is a false control to begin with, and letting go of it is you actually re-centering yourself within your own life. You don’t sum up other people by how perfectly they do every last thing in their lives. It’s their simple presence that makes all of these things beautiful and worthwhile. Could you learn to see yourself the same way?

Perfectionism isn’t about perfection, it’s about how others see you.— Lulie (@reasonisfun) April 14, 2021

I'll go over all the layers that I've been able to debug in myself. …I think that perfectionism is mostly a thin veil hiding a multitude of insecurities, fears, and logical fallacies. And it’s something we need to face.

A thing from art school that helped my drawing and comics practice a lot is I took a ceramics course. It taught me a lot about disposability. I was completely out of my depth being in a 2D brain in a 3D class, but also because I came in lacking the chill that the ceramics department all… …seemed to have? I learned that partly this was bc in ceramics there’s so many steps where things can go wrong, out of your control. One nudge into wet clay and your project is dead. When you let it dry it’s so brittle that you or anyone else in the studio might break it. When you glaze it, it might turn a colour you didn’t mean for it to be. When you fire it, a bubble in yours or anyone else's piece might… …explode and everything in the kiln gets fucked. Ceramics students were so chill bc they understood this and at some point they accepted. If pieces got ruined, usually the person who accidentally did it felt worse than the person whose work was ruined. But your skill, practice, … …vision still stays in your hands and your mind and you just quietly make another one, faster and usually better than the one that broke. It basically taught me that I should just not give too many shits about individual things I was making and learn to just keep moving. I’m not like, a making-machine or anything, other things stall me. But ceramics class taught me that nothing is sure, permanent, a big deal. If something is not good you just make another. Anyways I tell this story a lot because I’m old and repeat myself constantly now lol.

Think about blogging for a second: the fact that a list of posts is ordered chronologically by publication date, by default, is a bug in our incrementally-correct worldview. Blogging tools don't create any incentive to go back and edit previous ideas or posts. Or, at the very least, the default ordering has a de facto side effect of fewer people being aware of revisions or reversals to previously-published ideas.