Perfectly Imperfect
Collage by Megan Wheless
Images from collected magazines.
We inherently know perfectionism inhibits raw creativity. Yet, if you’re anything like me, you still buy into the concept of perfectionism. We’ve all heard our internal voice say something like: “If I just add this, my drawing will be perfect.” “I should’ve recorded myself dancing to my favorite song. My hair looked amazing this morning.” “I want to write poetry, but I’m not the best writer.” Or “Why can’t I sing as lovely as she does?”
Recently, I read a Poem a Day on my social media accounts for the month of April. I am very used to public speaking because I have been teaching for over 20 years. However, as soon as I turned the video on and saw my face and heard myself speak, I wanted to shut the entire project down. I began to criticize everything about myself and even started to second guess the poem I chose to read that day. My perfectionism was getting in the way of my desire to connect to others during this Covid-19 quarantine while also offering some beauty and chances for us to contemplate different themes each day. So, I set a hard boundary for myself: I could only record the poem in no more than 2-3 takes. It was hard to stick to this boundary, but I did. And each day I read a poem, I made some tiny error or had messy hair or saw that my teeth are more crowded and crooked than I realized. Two weeks into the project, though, I was having fun and anticipating my morning reading. I allowed myself to read poetry each morning and discover something I wanted to talk about and share my oral interpretation of the poem. Some of the poems were ones I wrote, others were ones that my grandmother or my husband’s grandmother wrote, and the rest were by canonized or popular poets whose words speak to me on a deep and soulful level. It turns out, others appreciated my gift and a few people were even moved to do their own poetry readings and share with the rest of us as well. It was beautiful. It was different. It was raw. And it was F-U-N!
Four years ago, I left my high school teaching job in Illinois for Asheville, NC. It has been a wild journey. And in that time, I worked as a crew member at Trader Joe’s, taught Yin yoga at a sweet studio in a neighboring town, met and married a wonderful man, became a stepmother and moved my life to Charlotte where I taught English as a Second Language to adult immigrants in the area. I also was diagnosed with a benign but fast growing breast tumor and in May 2019 I had a mastectomy followed by two breast reconstruction surgeries. This past year, I physically hit my limit and realized I had to take care of myself. It was then that I began to examine the fact that I was living all of these roles: wife, stepmother, teacher with an edge of perfectionism rolled into them. I held myself up to high expectations. But then my breast emergency hit, the stepchildren stopped visiting on a regular basis, and the coronavirus quarantine caused me to lose my job. With these roles (minus wife) stripped away and a lot of free time on hand, I decided to turn towards my creativity and self-expression in a more authentic way.
I have had to push away the perfectionism that creeps in to my daily creative life. I remind myself that my gardening is about reconnecting to Mother Nature and her invitation to wildness. I allow myself to dance between joy and frustration as I tease out scenes for the novel I am writing. I give myself permission to mess up this blog’s layout for a chance to express my ideas about Dear Heart Art’s mission while I discover more of my writer’s voice as I go along. I cook good food and worry less about presentation and more about the flavors and satisfaction of chopping vegetables, trying out new recipes, and eating the bounty of my labor.
From the ages of about 7-10, I was teeming with imagination and talent. I danced in our kitchen, moving my hips and shoulders to the beat while my body engaged in the ancient dance of drums sounding out the earth’s heartbeat. I walked and talked with imaginary friends and creatures who guided me as I walked in the woods or helped my parents in the garden. I would spend hours day dreaming, drawing and coloring, writing poetry, and noticing details of flowers, bugs, and the way the sunlight filtered through the trees.
Then, something happened. I encountered the “real world” and I felt afraid and was taught to be afraid. (I imagine this “something” happens to us all at some point in our lives. It usually starts in puberty.) I either had to stop moving my hips a certain way because I was told it was too sexual or inappropriate in public or I had to perform my dances and show off my skills. I had to serve detentions in school for daydreaming, drawing bubble people instead of stick figures, writing with both hands at the same time during class while the teacher lectured. I felt embarrassed or guilty when someone caught me singing, dancing, and stomping in mud puddles. I apologized to my art teacher after he made me cry when he lectured me for not following his exact directions of mixing colors for a still-life project. I hid my body as best as I could when I started beating boys at sports or they started ogling me when I played sports with them. Dancing and interpretation of music was replaced by hours of watching MTV and trying to recreate those artists’s dance moves, their looks, and their attitudes.
Originality and joy faded out of me. I replaced it with doing nearly every activity in my life with intense perfectionism - not so I would get noticed for my work, but so I could stay small and avoid criticism, rejection, flattery, and praise for the act of creativity I was engaging in. Not the outcome. The act. My creativity became hidden under my desire to “meet or exceed” expectations in hopes that once I met or exceeded whatever I thought the authority in context wanted from me the pressure would finally be lifted and I could get back to the secret and pleasureful act of creating.
“Look at me, don’t look at me,” became my dance and struggle into adulthood. And, I chose a profession where I was “center stage” to a certain degree. Yet, teaching was a creative act. Most days, I was engaged with the people in front of me and our focus was on the interpretation of literature, the crafting of words, the intellectual curiosity of complex themes, the humor and hubris of 30 people in a room for fifty minutes and a well-written, fluid lesson plan that allotted for deviation from superficial goals of grades and test scores so we could wade in deep into self-discovery, self-expression, and the human experience.
Perfectionism wasn’t the goal when I taught (or when I teach). It’s about the act. Being in the moment and letting others (i.e., the “students”) guide and be led down a rabbit hole of thoughts and feelings. And getting lost in the moment to the point where time becomes nonexistent and we are all feeling that a little magic is in the room and inside us. It doesn’t happen every day. But, I like chasing after it any way. And that’s why I really create. I’m just chasing the magic and allowing myself to be filled by inspiration and fueled by joy. And perfectionism doesn’t exist at these moments. And so, I get curious. I loosen the mental ties to social rules or norms for the moment in the role as creator, writer, instructor, artist, gardener, wife, etc., and just dip my toes back into the pool of magical realism - where my imagination runs supreme and I can talk to imaginary friends and develop their stories on a computer screen and dance in my living room in my pajamas.