Keep Your Glass Slipper--I'll Wear Flip-Flops.

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

 

I keep forgetting that writing is a PROCESS. In fact, it’s a birth, which is the biggest process of them all. Which means that when you deliver, it’s not pink and beautiful and smelling like Johnson’s Baby Lotion. It comes out messy and covered with goop but you don’t see that—all you see is the miracle that this is a fucking living breathing BEING that somehow you were blessed enough to have a part in bringing into the world and then you hand it over to nurses to clean it off.

 

And these midwives—who have done this a shitload more times than you’ve given birth—they don’t look at it and see the goop. They see the potential. They see what it can be. What it already is but just needs some help becoming. They’re not judging you, and chastising you for popping out a goopy baby. They’re congratulating you for all the hard work and effort you put forth in giving birth.

 

I’ll admit it. Ten books later, I still want my babies to come out like the one on the Ivory Snow bottle. I want it be pink and rosy-cheeked and smiling. In fact, I want it to be a prodigy who goes to Harvard at, like, age five.

 

Well, I THINK that’s what I want it to be like. Because there’s this old belief that if I give birth to the perfect baby then obviously I’M perfect. And if I’m perfect, nothing bad will ever happen to me.

 

Which isn’t possible. On either count. I’m human, and as long as my heart is beating, shit’s going to happen. Good and bad.

 

And people who I (mistakenly) think are perfect — at least at first glance — both intimidate and annoy the hell out of me anyway.

 

My latest baby isn’t perfect. Far from it. None of them have been, and yet I have this built-in forgettor that tries to tell me that the other ones have been closer to perfect. That they’ve never need as much work as this one does. Which isn’t true either. They’ve all needed work. And as much as I’ve always believed this was going to be the time when I wouldn’t be up to the task, that’s never come to pass either.

 

It’s a process.

 

Shit.  I HATE process. I’m much more into the results thing.

The irony about all this is that as I was taking in the notes that one of my midwives was giving me, I was reading a screenplay written by a dear friend of mine. It’s a first draft, and she asked me if I’d read it and give her feedback. Because of the first draft thing, sure, it needs work, but as I was reading it, I wasn’t focusing on that. Instead I was focusing—more like marveling—on the fact that the script is so representative of her spirit which is just so beautiful and cool and deep and perfectly imperfect—all that stuff that makes her one of my favorite people in the world. 

I once heard someone say that often the things we think people love us for are actually the things they love us in spite of. 

Like, say, the fact that we’re human.