hello at 80%: confessions of a procrastinating perfectionist

So this is my first official blog post. I’m not sure yet what I’m trying to accomplish, but I’m fairly confident that trying to simply accomplish is the goal at this point. I actually started a blog a few years ago and gave it up before ever officially posting. In fact, most of my creative endeavors have led tortured lives retarded development: house decorating (after five years, I still haven’t painted my bedroom closet doors or purchased window treatments for most of the house), cooking regularly (my constant search for the perfect recipe and ingredients on the most nutritionally balanced menu is impossibly time consuming), painting (forget it, started too late in life to ever be a master), photography (fantastic camera but never as good as my uber-talented friends), teaching projects (the perfect lesson plan is ever-evolving), career choices (too many, and with so much personal validation tied in, how to choose?), further education (you ARE your alma-mater), reading lists . . .   Why? Because Amanda Martin has one official motto: “Anything worth doing is worth doing right.”

Thus, the paralyzing perfectionism of my infertile creative life.

I don’t know exactly when that motto was born but after observing scores of friends who suffer the same paralysis, I’m fairly confident I’m just a product of my driven, competitive culture.  Or was. Until two weeks ago. Two weeks ago when I was reviewing some test scores for my brother whom I homeschool in English 9. After 5+ years out of the classroom, I was pretty nervous about his scores. Other chronic overachievers will understand the connection between HIS scores and MY personal worth and validation. Looking over his various subjects, I was relieved to find that he scored at 80% on the grammar and mechanics portion of the test . . . and was subsequently stunned by my relief.

80%. Since when did 80% become acceptable to the Most Outstanding Female Graduate at Gardner-Webb University class of 1999? But I was satisfied. Able to disassociate my own value from the performance of my brother, I realized that my standards for others have become, thanks to an incredible church community, graciously more merciful than my personal critical review. And there was such relief. I could go on teaching him. I hadn’t completely screwed up his literary education.

I don’t know if you can understand this if you haven’t lived under the tyranny of the A+ (because you knew you could always do better, or at least that’s what everyone was telling you), but in that moment, life changed. I accepted a universality: if 80% was good enough for my brother in my own eyes, it was good enough for me. And something unlocked. I could now cook a meal without days of planning and shopping for the absolute best ingredients. I could buy clothes that were completely everyman at Target with the full knowledge that I would run into at least three other women with the same shirt.  I could be 10 to 15 pounds overweight and still feel worth the oxygen required to sustain me, and I could diet and work out without quitting every time I had a set back. I could write without the pressure that the product had to be the most profound chemistry of syntax and epistemology ever concocted. I could be AVERAGE. Oh the complete and utter joy of AVERAGE!!

The unlocked creativity has been astounding. Several years ago, I had a spiritual experience reading the novel Duma Key by Stephen King. In the novel, the main character suffers the loss of an arm and complete personal deconstruction. He goes to Duma Key, a fictional island in Florida, to rediscover normal and be reborn into society. While there, he experiences the sensation known as a “phantom limb” (the brain’s confusion that a missing body part is still present). For him, however, the sensation foreshadows cataclysmic creative seizures in which he paints for hours and hours, possessed by a force beyond himself, with – the text insinuates – his phantom hand. Prior to the loss of his limb, the character had never even gestured towards art. This experience of an adult suddenly erupting into violent creative production is called “uncorking.” I cannot explain the connection the Holy Spirit will make in my heart to a truth, but as soon as I read this, I knew that I would one day experience such an explosion. But short of sawing off a limb, I had no idea what could prompt such an awakening. Like all spiritual landmarks, it had to be received, not engineered.

I did not lose an arm. But my deconstruction is as acute and reconfiguring. I am sawing off the hand that holds the measuring stick, that is quick to put my work under the magnifying glass. I am throwing away the benchmarks, the progress reports, the lists of goals unachieved AND awards earned, my disappointed dreams, my perverse preconceptions of valid art and life. I am throwing away the last chapter of my life that pride had pre-written, the one with the resume and the epitaph for my tombstone. Art, at least for me, can only be purely created in anticipation of anonymity. This is not cynicism,  it is the crucifixion of vanity.

And so here I am, on WordPress, my Duma Key, an alien landscape with a predestined appointment for me. And you, friend, are unfortunately here to observe a writer with perhaps no better chance at valuable reading than 80%. But on the other phantom hand, we can wait together for the divine to intercede and leave us both gasping for breath and utterly delighted.

In the meantime, here’s to Average.