Perfectionism (Be afraid and do the thing anyway)

Let me know if this sounds familiar:

Wake up, determined to do the thing – crochet, write, paint, draw, whatevah. Spend an inordinate amount of time searching through your stash for THE right supplies, set up your space, get comfy. Freak out. Take a walk, do dishes, put in a load of laundry, clean the bathroom, sweep, vacuum, grocery shop. Force yourself to return to your comfy space and perfect supplies. Stare at the empty screen/blank canvas/hook and yarn, and wonder what were you actually thinking. Give up. Go feel like crap and do more other stuff instead.

Yeah, I know, I know. I have spent years of my life feeling like this.

I made all sorts of excuses – I’m too tired and stressed from work, I’m trying to run a house and my smalls need me to make dinner/do the laundry/get them to school. I can do it tomorrow when I’m feeling more motivated. All my ideas disappeared the second I pulled up the blank screen and now I don’t know what to write about.

At its heart, this is all about not doing the thing unless it can be done perfectly on the first try (sigh).

Guess what? It’s better to do something than nothing. Every single time.

Live a little – it doesn’t have to be perfect, or even great, the first time around. When I get some words down, I call it a first draft. I can edit until I’m happy with the finished product. Crochet, and all art for that matter, works the same way – just get something down, and keep working with it until you love it!

An example of this at play (also including this very post lols): I’ve been working on a new crochet pattern since the weekend.

It’s gone like this: Watched a couple episodes of House of the Dragon and was inspired to design a corset belt (fantasy nerd for life!). I had the basic idea of what I wanted in my head, sought out a stitch that accomplished the look I wanted, and set about to making it come to life.

I wrote out the pattern as I went, typed it up, then worked on a second corset belt in a different yarn since the first one I used turned out pretty stiff. I made a couple small changes and corrections to the written pattern as I went – then it hit me. Instead of adding the final details one by one and creating a ton of ends to weave in, I could have just finished my bottom row, turned to add loops up the side, crocheted the finishing row across the top and the final row of loops down the opposite side without ever cutting the yarn.

For the crochet newbies, what I’m saying is I can eliminate a handful of ends that need to be weaved in later by just continuing stitching on around the project without cutting the yarn (oh goodness…I’m smarter than this, really).

So, now I’m rewriting that bit, and feeling pretty silly for not seeing it in the first place.

I would have totally missed out on finding a “wrong way” to do something by never trying in the first place, and that wrong way led me on to a better way to succeed.

It didn’t have to be perfect on the first try at all, just enough for me to work with so I could make this a project I’m proud of.