Perfection through connection

[missroserose]

Life's been, as usual, kind of nuts.  I was sick for a week (hence the spate of posting) and then felt like I was constantly running to catch up.  Still am, a bit, but I'm sitting down right now and that's good.

I'm toying with the idea of joining a holiday fic exchange.  I'm a little hesitant because so far I've been having trouble finishing stuff (I'm up to three works in progress right now, two of which were supposed to be quick one-offs).  But on the other hand, maybe having a deadline would help motivate me to accept imperfection, rather than constantly editing and reediting because I know that perfect fic is there somewhere.

On the upside, my connection-over-perfection mantra has been helping me quite a bit in the performance arenas.  I spent this past weekend with a couple of professional (and ridiculously talented) writer friends in New York, as well as my new crush (also a ridiculously talented writer), and we held an impromptu salon with reading and music.  I do feel I acquitted myself decently on the guitar—my efforts were far from perfect, but everyone seemed to enjoy the performance.  And getting to show off a bit in front of one's crush is never a bad feeling.

Along those same lines, I've been pushing out of my comfort zone with my yoga teaching lately.  Rather than writing out a sequence ahead of time and trying desperately to remember it all, I'm working on a more extemporaneous approach, having a few ideas in my head and taking input from people as they come in (i.e. "What would you like to work on?").  It's working pretty well so far; or, at least, I haven't panicked and left everyone hanging, though at times it's come awfully close—once or twice I wasn't even sure what was going to come out of my mouth until I said it.  But apparently I sell it pretty well, because I haven't had a single person yet ask me "so, what the heck was that about?" after class yet.

Last night I had one of my artist friends over for dinner.  I met him randomly in a bar in the neighborhood a couple months ago, and I'm so glad I did—he's extremely talented and loves designing tattoo art, in addition to being a generally intelligent and interesting dude.  I'm commissioning my next tattoo design from him, and judging by his initial sketches I feel like he's going to do an excellent job turning my random word salad of concepts into a work of art.  It's a little scary for me, because I'm so not a visual artist and I can't predict what it's going to look like, but it's also exhilarating.  And really, the stakes aren't that high—I don't have to get it tattooed if I don't like it.

Really, that might be the biggest takeaway from this whole letting-go-of-perfectionism project.  Ultimately, the stakes just aren't that high.  If I mess up a performance, well, I look like an idiot for a minute and then everyone forgets about it.  Same with a yoga class.  If a collaboration doesn't work, no worries, I find someone else to collaborate with.  I'm not a doctor, a lawyer, or in any other extremely high-stakes and unforgiving profession (thank God).  I can just breathe and...go with it.

...In truth, I feel like I have to keep learning this over and over.  Hopefully I'm making progress as well.