Motivation Mondays: Trust Vs. Perfectionism

“Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.” --Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

Well, it seems kind of after the fact to be writing about Black Swan, but I only just saw it the weekend before last and I love what it has to say about the creative process, how the refusal to let go can keep an artist stagnant, stuck, frigid.

I think we all have own version of that creeeeepy mother character in our heads, the vain perfectionist who doesn’t want us to take risks or make out with Mila Kunis. It’s that inner censor that I’m always going on and on about, that protective force that warps us and keeps us from knowing our own strength. It’s hard to get privacy from that judgment and fear, but we really do have to bar the door and get on with it.

Unlike Natalie Portman’s ballerina, we can do it. We can let go without self-destructing. I think it has to do with that tricky thing I’ve been wrestling with for the whole life of this blog: trust.

That’s why am so profoundly in love with 30/30—I’m so very very grateful for the amount of trust and generosity it takes to post an early draft every day and invite our friends, some of whom we’ve never met in real life, to read and comment. I really can’t think of a more loving or faithful gesture. In showing each other our flaws, our vulnerabilities, our stories we only tell when things get urgent, we’re writing ourselves a real intimacy and a real way forward. Thank you, and thank you, and thank you, and thank you.

January Resolution #2: Practice Trust

I do feel a little more trusting than I did at the beginning of the month. I don’t feel like everything and everyone is disappearing, etc. Maybe it is simply a Seasonal Affective matter and most of my issues could be solved with full-spectrum lightbulbs, I don’t know.

Anyway, the other day I did a pretty cathartic act of trust—I gave away a whole bunch of my previously hoarded school supplies to a school that had recently burned down.

I didn’t give way the real capital—I kept my Poetry Speaks books and my Kenneth Koch lessons and my Poetry 180s. But every time I feel insecure and unworthy of teaching, I tend to spend money on supplies. Last summer when I was afraid I would never teach again, I bought mountains of stuff for my summer classes, only a fraction of which got used.

Dropping off that stuff was like getting rid of the fear and loneliness that lead me to purchase it in the first place. What a relief to turn that psychological baggage into something productive.

It was an act of trust in my well-supplied current job and in my future teaching life.

Of course, if I end up teaching in a public school I’ll expect to shell out for supplies again, but I hope I’ll be doing it out of necessity and not as a way to soothe feelings of unworthiness.