I used to have a problem with perfection. I worried that if what I posted wasn’t perfect, then the sky would fall in. It’s been 27 days since I started this 28 day blogging challenge. And I’ve posted every single day. Have they all been perfect? Have they hell! And has the sky fallen in? No it hasn’t. In fact it’s very much still up there and very sunny to boot. I used to write my blog posts and then come back to them a few hours later, or better still the next day. But when you’re writing a post on top of everything else. When you’re writing posts for clients (they actually do have to be quite perfect…), and for your other, more businessy blog, you don’t have time to worry about perfection. In fact, you barely have time to edit at all. Actually that’s bollocks, everything gets at least one edit: one paragraph a few days ago had to be rewritten five times. But only because I was having an adjective crisis.
I wondered at the beginning of all this what I would learn, and I don’t want to pre-empt my review process, but I have learnt to worry less about perfection. I still have standards, but I think I’m a little less precious about them. A couple of times I’ve posted a Seamus cartoon that I’d already drawn instead of writing a post from scratch. I felt so guilty that I wasn’t writing on those days, but the sky didn’t fall in and people liked the cartoons.
The letting go has spilled over into other areas of my life too. This morning I went for a run and I took Kimber with me. I really wanted to run my first five kilometres, but I had to stop to pick up poop, jog on the spot while she played with her friends, and I ended up being 300 metres short. C’est la vie. I was still chuffed. And drawing the cartoon for this week’s Sunday Sunshine involved drawing the Eiffel Tower. Which is trickier than you might think if you can’t really draw very well. I had to practise heaps, and even then redraw it five times. In the end, I just thought, it vaguely looks like it might be a tower, and let it be. Hopefully nobody will think Seamus is in Blackpool; because the story won’t make any sense at all!
Sam this is so true! I think one of the most important lessons in life is that the sky doesn’t fall in and the sooner we do get it the less stressful life becomes. My other favourite mantra is ‘this too shall pass’ as even the most horrible of stuff does pass even if we have to redefine what our ‘normal’ is.
Hooray for posting every day! 🙂