This past weekend, I submitted a piece of my art to participate in a month-long gallery display here in Rhode Island for the first time ever. The piece is entitled “Breaking Free from Perfectionism,” and you can see the finished product here…
My Battle with Perfectionism
While I have always been an artist, I have never been brave enough to show my artwork as an adult publicly. I have wrestled with perfectionism for most of my life, and I have constantly told myself that I wasn’t “good enough” to show my art, among other things.
I’m not really an artist, I’d tell myself. I haven’t been to school for art, I’m not formally trained, my art isn’t like that person’s art, I don’t do realism well. It’s just kind of kid-like and silly. There are far more talented people than me. I have nothing to say. Etc., etc., etc.
I just constantly downplay myself.
This perfectionism has spilled into multiple areas of my life. Perfectionism became the silent, suffocating burden I bore upon my back in most circumstances in my teenage years and my 20s.
It became, in the way I’ve portrayed it in my recent artwork, a cage that hindered me — a stifling, life-extinguishing cage that until more recently was beginning to crush me.
Because perfectionism really is a cage. It locks you away, making you always hesitant to do anything or say anything or expose yourself in any real way. You’re constantly weighing your actions, words, likes, dislikes under this sort of crushing weight that you’ll never really be whatever it is that you think you have to be in order to succeed or arrive or achieve.
You’ll never attain it.
Never.
Nothing will ever, ever, ever be enough.
So you can’t really do anything, or be yourself, or really live…
