Embracing the incomplete

Ok, enough is enough. I have been avoiding writing for some time now, feeling as though what I’ve been doing was never complete enough to be worthy of posting. I’m exploring the feeling of unworthiness through striving for perfection with my therapist on a regular basis. It seems to be a consistent theme during our visits.

Maintaining a creative mind

It’s currently challenging to sit for long periods of time to work on something creative, whether it be writing, sketching or other. My neck and tailbone are consistently protesting my desire to sit for hours at a time to complete the work.

While I am finding relief from pain in my new ability to pace myself, I’m finding it hard to maintain a creative thought in between my resting time, sometimes hours, sometimes days. When I come back to it, the creative juice has run dry and I move on to other ideas or find myself staring with a blank mind at the blank page. It feels like most of what I consider to be my best work was done with feverish concentration, working with extreme focus until the idea was successfully extracted from my mind and applied to paper.

This way of working no longer suits me however. My body has been trying to tell me for some time that it’s not happy with this methodology, but I’ve been exceptionally good at ignoring it’s cues. Alas, my body has finally knocked some sense into me and I am learning more and more everyday how to hear her pleas for rest, comfort, and pleasure.

While I am still experimenting with how I can fully express my creative thoughts and respect my body’s needs simultaneously, I am going to do something that I’ve never done before: share with you my unfinished work (!). To give you a sense of how big of a deal this is to me, I’ll share a short story:

A short story about half-assed work

In my final year of a forest management program, our faculty staff went on strike. This coincided with our final project, a forest management plan, that accounted for some 20% of our total mark. I had already been offered a job and had already planned my move to a new town after graduation. Our professors were not allowed to support us with out projects and we were discouraged from crossing the picket lines. They did however, encourage us to “simply do your best” and hand in whatever we thought was appropriate.

For me, this was incomprehensible. So, instead of putting something together “half-assed”, I met with each of the professors to ask them what my grade would be if I did not complete the plan at all. Each professor said I would still pass with honours. So, I thanked them for their support, took the hit to my grades, graduated, and went on to start my career.

The thought of handing in something incomplete (to my standards) was too much for me to bare. I’m not saying that this was the best decision, nor that it is something that I want to live by. In fact, I believe it’s a sign that I have many reasons to embrace the incomplete and the idea that it’s OK to not be perfect. In the end, what would handing in an incomplete project have done? It would have given me the opportunity to try something new and difficult. It would have challenged me to find answers in places I perhaps wouldn’t have looked before. What it wouldn’t have done, contrary to my beliefs, was destroy my reputation as a “good student” or prove to my peers and professors that I was unworthy of graduating for handing in such a disappointing project.

I decided instead to walk away, keeping my reputation intact rather than risk being ousted as a fraud. Kind of like how I’ve been feeling lately with regard to my incomplete creative works.

My incomplete sketch works

All that to say, I feel empowered (and a little frightened) to be sharing with you some incomplete sketch works. I hope you feel empowered to try something new or challenging, even if it means the result is not ‘perfect’.