When I was in the sixth grade, one of our projects for language arts class was to teach our classmates how to do something. It didn’t matter what it was, it just needed to be something written out in steps in the most clear (and preferably concise) manner so as to convey what it was that was to be accomplished and how you were supposed to manage it. And I had the hardest damn time trying to decide what I could teach people; the only idea I ever managed to even scribble on a scrap of paper was how to be good at math. (Granted, this was way before I met up with calculus, and I was partially convinced that I should be an accountant or something similarly mathly when I grew up. The joys of the tapering off of adolescence! After my first semester of college-level maths I abandoned that mess but quick.) I was too embarrassed to even list out steps for Achieving Math Prowess, or whatever I would’ve called it in my painfully precocious way, and I never actually turned that project in. Not sure how I avoided it, but at this point I’ve got my bachelor’s degree plus I could teach people how to sew a flat felled seam if Mrs. Lindsay ever reads this and cajoles me into doing a make-up report now that I’m almost damn thirty.
But part of being thirty, for me at least, is being able to fake some maturity and play Stuart Smalley with yourself: to be able to re-hash things that made you feel bad when you were a kid, and give yourself a break. To say it wasn’t stupid to try to teach people how to be good at math, but more than that, to really believe it wouldn’t have been stupid. I’m still sort of tripping over that, and maybe I always will because I, you know, never did that project, but this same theme revisits me all the time. I see it at work, with my friends, with my hobbies: this crazy, eyeball-popping perfectionism that I have to HAVE in order to feel OKAY about doing anything at all. I’m especially conscious of how much I do this with sewing-related activities, both actually sewing and procuring stuff with which to actually sew (fabric and notions and patterns, good grief).
And now, for the *ahem* MEAT of the situation.
I’m going a little crazy lately with … well, I guess a lot of stuff, but let’s focus on sewing business. I keep buying fabric, and patterns, and buttons, and books, and magazines, and notions, and tools, and all kinds of STUFF. I even hired out a Cedar Specialist to create a shelving solution for the fabric that has taken over the top of the hope chest, because it’s been too full to fit any more fabric for over a year now. It’s not for having a lack of inspiration, in the form of any possible variable, it’s just that I’m suffocating under the weight of Possible Perfection. I’ve got all these vague, washed-out pictures in my head of what the perfect dress in that one fabric could look like on me, and there are Two Main Things totally, utterly, completely, balls-to-the-wall wrong with that scenario. First, they are vague, fuzzy, underexposed and off-center pictures that I only have a kinda sorta glimpse of because I’m trying to be all natural and organic in my VISION. Just let it come naturally! don’t force it! let it be, man! and et cetera. And you know what? It’s deceptively and crazy-ass difficult to draw fantastically intricate and clean detail from the sweeping thoughts that surround a first impression. That mess is hard. Monks and shamans and hippies work their whole lives to get good at that, and even when they’re a hundred years old they’re still not perfect. Which leads me to the Second Main Thing wrong with trying to get work done based on intangibles: it works, for a split second in your head, because of its intangible nature. That dress looks perfect on my frame and those colors are stellar with my complexion because I’m taking the most sweeping glance at it imaginable. I’m not breaking down any of the hundred parts into how it might work in reality, so that all the details I could possibly want are already present, I just have to squint to make them out. Unfortunately, this kind of defeats the purpose of leaving the house in the morning; if I want otherworldly perfection, I’m going to have to start taking a lot more hallucinogenic drugs and, for my more materially pressing concerns, regularly happen upon brown paper bags full of twenty-dollar bills at the bus stop. In the meantime? I have just got to get some FBA techniques down pat and start sewing up some dresses.
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