The Illusion of Perfection
The reason that perfection is an illusion is because it is never here and now. It is always in some far off distant future. The lie that accompanies that illusion is that you will know when you are ready, when the piece of work is perfect; you will know from the feeling. You will sense that it has reached the dizzying heights of perfection and then you will release it out into the world and the world will respond well because it is perfect.
Except that day never arrives, the feeling never visits and you never get the sense that the time has come. Instead the goal posts keep moving, you keep starting again, nothing you create seems good enough and so you keep going, trying to attain that false idea of making something flawless. It’s an illusion that is costly because your creations don’t get to be shared or even witnessed by you. They never get to complete a full journey; the seed of an idea to the manifestation of it. You inhabit a no man's land where works are begun and never completed or where you are perpetually starting afresh.
When you are in this cycle you don’t see it, like fish don’t recognise water. It feels real and as though this is the reality you are in because your work is not good enough and because you haven’t put in enough time or honed your skills. You are living in a lie so you can’t see it. It takes someone from the outside observing to knock on your door and say, excuse me, your work is ready, you are ready, the time is now.
Consider this your knock on the door. Do not seek perfection, do not wait for this imagined ideal for it is imagined. And you are the one who created these arbitrary lines. It is you that has decided that you are not quite ready and you are also leaving it up to you to decide when you will be. What if we just removed one part of this equation and took out the portion that requires this imaginary goal.
What if, instead you decided to create as much as you can and leave this idea of perfection alone. You dismiss it as an idea completely. In its place you put in experimentation and exploration. An idea is conceived and you get to travel this new journey with your ideas on an adventure where you are not held hostage to unfair and illusory parameters. You get to play and make messes and some pieces of art (which includes any form of creation) make it to a point of being shared and some stay private for you but all of them get to see a beginning, a middle and an end. They are not all held in limbo in some perfectionist purgatory; they are allowed to fly.
I understand that beneath these notions of creating perfection lies something deeper; the idea that you are not enough, therefore nothing you create is enough. And that is the biggest lie of them all. You are born enough and are innately enough and always have been. It’s something you have forgotten. The posts of perfectionism you have put up are to protect you from the fear that you are not making anything worthwhile, that your creations are not of value. But you are misguided by your own thoughts and beliefs about yourself. You are witnessing yourself and your artistic offerings through a blurry window. It is distorting your views and impacting how you create.
What if, whilst you are creating you could suspend your beliefs about yourself and your acts of creation. What if you allowed yourself to just be the conduit that you are and you left yourself out of the formula? This allows for whatever wants to come through to arrive and you get to enjoy the process and not feel defeated by it. The ideas that come through you are gifts bespoke to you. The ideas are seeds that come to you and only you because they have in them all the ingredients needed to make them come to life, but only through you. They need your perspective, your vision, your voice. They need you.
Allow them in, welcome them and then step aside and let them work through you. There is an alchemy that takes place in creating when we put aside the thoughts and feelings we have about ourselves and just let creativity play its part.