Loved this article written by Anne Lamott from an Inward/Outward post over the weekend.
Make a Mess, Discover Your Life
By Anne Lamott
Perfectionism
is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you
cramped and insane your whole life. I think perfectionism is based on the
obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone
just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and
that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a
whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.
Besides,
perfectionism will block inventiveness and playfulness and life force (these
are words we are allowed to use in California). Perfectionism means that you
try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess
show us that life is being lived. Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground—you can
still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, fix
things, get a grip. Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it’s going
to get. Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation.
When I was 21,
I had my tonsils removed. I was one of those people who got strep throat every
few minutes, and my doctor finally decided that I needed to have my tonsils
taken out. For the entire week afterward, swallowing hurt so much that I could
barely open my mouth for a straw. I had a prescription for painkillers, though,
and when they ran out but the pain hadn’t, I called the nurse and said she
would need to send another prescription over, and maybe a little mixed grill of
drugs because I was also feeling somewhat anxious. But she wouldn’t.
I asked to
speak to her supervisor. She told me her supervisor was at lunch and that I
needed to buy some gum, of all things, and to chew it vigorously—the thought of
which made me clutch at my throat. She explained that when we have a wound in
our body, the nearby muscles cramp around it to protect it from any more
violation and from infection, and that I would need to use these muscles if I
wanted them to relax again. So finally my best friend Pammy went out and bought
me some gum, and I began to chew it, with great hostility and skepticism. The
first bites caused a ripping sensation in the back of my throat, but within
minutes all the pain was gone, permanently.
I think that
something similar happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around our
wounds—the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of
adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both—to keep us from getting hurt in
the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never
have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some
cases we don’t even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both
limit us. They keep us moving in tight, worried ways. They keep us standing
back or backing away from life, keep us from experiencing life in a naked and
immediate way.
So go ahead and
make big scrawls and mistakes. Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of
idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow
(inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we
need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.
Anne Lamott is
a writer of books and essays. This piece is an excerpt from her book, Bird by
Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.
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