Beauty, Perfection, and Seashells

I have long been a perfectionist. I believed in straight lines, right angles, and right answers. If you can't do it perfectly, don't try. If you do try you had better give it all you have until it is perfect. To be fair, it helped me accomplish a lot. Perfectionism got me Magna cum Laude and departmental honors in a subject that didn't come especially easy to me. It got me into Phi Beta Kappa. It made me a better writer and a better dancer. It also gave me crippling anxiety and depression. I was terrified to make the wrong move in relationships, in my career, and just generally in life. I wanted to count the squares ahead of me so I would know which move would be sure to lead me to happiness with the fewest rolls of the dice.

It's something I've known I should fight for a long time. But I believed that if I stopped trying for perfection I would fail, and failure was unacceptable. I also saw fighting against it as a losing battle and if you know you are going to lose why fight, right? I'd been trying for a couple of years, making glacial progress, but since last summer something started to change: I started to win.

And you know what? It turns out that trying is FUN. It is just as fun if you end up not being good at what you're trying. Sometimes more. And I like myself a lot more. There's still the voice in the back of my head that whispers that I'm not good enough, that nothing I do is as good as what others can do so I should just stop, but it's getting easier to shut that voice up.

I'm still ambitious. I still put all of myself into what I do. I just don't beat myself up as much if it doesn't work out. I actually try harder now. I don't avoid practicing because it no longer ends with abuse. The other day I did a truly atrocious painting. This thing was UGLY. The little voice started back up and I felt bad for even trying...for a minute. Then I looked at it again and just laughed. I noticed that I did the shape part pretty well and decided I'd try to fix the colors in a couple of days. Then I practiced guitar and decided to just wing it on a recipe. 

Obviously I still have my bad days, but I don't think I really recognized how much of my perfectionism had ebbed away until I went beachcombing with a new friend today. She only picked up the most perfect shells: big and unbroken. I started to do the same, out of habit. And don't get me wrong, I kept some of those perfect shells.

And they're pretty. But...kind of boring. They're the kind of shell you see everywhere. You can buy these things in bundles at tourist trap stores. They're just not exciting. The Hallmark-y phrase that kept running through my mind all morning was "Sometimes the broken shells are more beautiful than the perfect ones."

The broken shells are the ones that let you in. The inner structure is almost always more beautiful than the outside. And the inside gleams, polished by the life in contained.

The imperfect shells tell stories. Your eyes glide over the whole, shapely shells that look like every third grader's drawing but these hold your attention. You want to spend time on these shells, to see them from every angle.

The other phrase that leapt into my head today and stuck there was "I'm interested in beauty, not perfection." I like that one better and I think I'll keep it as a life motto. My perfectionism is disappearing in everyday things like learning to draw or play guitar but when it comes to my life as a whole I still worry constantly that I'll make a wrong move, or worse, that I've already made a move that will fuck it all up. It can be a paralyzing thought. But I'm getting braver.

Things get shattered, or just turn out different than you'd planned. You leave the board and travel in any direction you choose. You make mistakes, things change, choices you thought were right might feel wrong later, but you'll never know until it's too late so the best you can do is follow your heart. Holes may be blown in the walls you've lived within for a long time, but what you go through can only ever add depth, complexity, and ultimately, beauty.