The Gremlins of Perfection

Confessions of a recovering perfectionist.

Substack popped into my cyber mail with a jolly little acknowledgement that life gets busy but wanted to remind me that folk value my work. I was astonished. Also rather abashed that Substack thought to bring it to my attention. Because honestly, it has been on my mind. It has become a bit of a thing, even.

Because of my silence for such a long time (Substack mentioned eight months) I thought I had best re-introduce myself. In a nutshell, I am way past the point of being returned to sender, I took up writing, in part, to reap wrath upon the idiots who mistreat animals, and to share a yarn or two. I love to draw. I used to dance, and still occassionaly fling my body around with abandonment when the tunes are twitching my muscle memory. I live an eclectic life with a fabulous fellow, three donkeys and a dog. I am a qualified expert at the art of procrastination.

I could give you a hundred, no, a thousand, reasons for being somewhat sluggish in getting words on paper the past few months, but none of them really amount to much. It does seem that the Gremlins of Perfection continue to find my methods of artistic expression fertile ground for their tenacious and irritating lectures on worthiness and the like. They demand all sorts of impossible things and should I actually achieve an accepting nod from one of them, they immediately hang the bar a notch higher.

Little buggers.

A while back I mentioned that I had excellent advice from writing friends and people who know how to use the pointy end of the sword when taking the mickey out of the stereotype of an artist suffering in a frigid attic with only stale bread, a nude muse, and unlimited crates of wine available. Granted, the wine sounds good, but who wants to share a small attic room with a person headed for a bad chest cold at best, a dreadful wracking illness at worst? And unless you are equipped with a toaster, stale bread is better used as a weapon.

Their advice was to chuck the culture of perfection at all costs into the mists of retreating negativity and find the happy in the doing. I rather like this strategy.

Those little perfection gremlins that sit upon my shoulders and tangle themselves in annoying ways in my rapidly greying hair are appalled at this new approach to my endeavours. Their little eyes bung out like they have just been attached to a high voltage wire. They throw themselves with fierce exasperation across the pages of my notebook, their fingers pinching and poking the words I have chosen, eyebrows raised and mouths pursed into unpleasant little knots of disapproval. They hiss nonstop critiques into my ears and celebrate my hard earned contentment with spiteful comments. I am hoping they will exhaust themselves soon and settle down to enjoy the rather blissful feeling of being released from some imagined standard of excellence.

Time for them, I say staunchly, to remember that I am quite content to tell tales without clever words, remarkable sentence structure or the rhythm and style of a seriously committed word wizard.

I might even try the idea of brevity, give it a spin around the dance floor and see who is left standing.

Thanks so much for being here. I am glad to be back having left the Gremlins battling it out about who gets the ailing muse and who gets the stale bread. I legged it with the wine.

‘Til the next time, kristine