Too Precious to Exist

I love Mondays. I love mornings. I love the seasons, a season before it begins. I like the potential, the endless possibilities of where something can go. It excites me to think about and dream about. Everything is possible before it starts. Everything is exactly how it’s envisioned to be. Everything is perfect before it has begun. By holding everything, it is nothing. It is only an idea. 

In art school, I found myself obsessively sharpening my pencils and charcoal sticks with a blade and sanding them down to a fine point on sandpaper. I would hold a thin measuring stick up with a locked elbow, one eye closed. Perfectly steady. Marking the distance with my thumb, carefully sliding my straightened arm horizontally toward my paper to mark, then sliding back again to check and recheck. To get it right, even though the mark had already been placed. I checked my phone. I went to the bathroom. I looked at the clock. I was at the point in the drawing that I no longer felt comfortable with. Sometimes my mind says that because I know I can do it, I don’t need to prove that I can. So it stays in my mind.

Italy was the first time someone called it out. During my study abroad trip, there was an instructor who saw my hesitation. In an art critique of my work, he said I was holding back. I had never felt so seen. How did he know? I didn’t even realize until that moment. I was afraid to take it to the end.

I want things to be perfect, which makes me struggle to finish or even start them at all. Sometimes, I regret that choice. Early postpartum, I couldn’t write in my son’s baby book or my birth journal much because my handwriting wouldn’t be pretty with my son sleeping on me. The result was that little was recorded. I would have preferred imperfect. Imperfect here would have been better than writing down less and recalling it in retrospect when the memory already starts to polish. 

In grad school I was convinced I wasn’t a perfectionist because my work had shortcomings. I procrastinated even though procrastination stressed me out. I liked my concepts, but I could never execute them to the standard I knew I was capable of. I completed the assignment to meet the deadline, but I was embarrassed by my work. I used to feel like I was at the top, and suddenly it felt as if I was at the bottom. I can’t be a perfectionist because everyone is better than me.

My work doesn’t need to be absolutely accurate. That is hard for me to even write. I strive for truth. I don’t like to be inaccurate. I don’t even like to paraphrase people’s words in conversation. I spent hours putting Lemon Baby to scale with a thyme flower. I searched nurseries for a specific type and ordered the plant when I couldn’t find it. I researched and made scale drawings because I wanted accuracy for a birthday invitation. Not because my guests know how big Lemon Baby is and that he fits within the calyx of a lemon flower. But I knew. What if someone thought about the scale of a lemon flower and a thyme plant? I want to depict something so perfectly that someone who knows more than me can’t see where my knowledge, time, or capacity ends.

My book deserves care but not at the cost of becoming too precious to exist. It’s so easy to keep something in a working state. To find reasons why this day or that is not a good time to work on it. The room needs to be clean, my energy needs to be higher, the time of day needs to be different in order for me to work. I didn’t want to do digital painting for the birthday invitations. It didn't capture the tone of this project, and yet that is what I did in order to get the invites out the door. Conditions don’t need to be optimal. In this season of life I don’t get optimal. Perhaps that’s always true. My desire to create must overcome this hurdle of potential.

I don’t want to mention the thyme because I don’t want to draw attention to it. I still don’t think it’s that good. I didn’t want an ambiguous thyme plant. I wanted a specific one. I had to generalize because I didn’t have the time or resources to fully depict its botanical truth. I am a medical illustrator, and I feel that I should be accurate. I’m trained to be accurate. I am a bit embarrassed. I’m a perfectionist because I think it’s not perfect. Even writing this now still makes me nervous. That is why I will write about it anyway even though I really don’t want to.

Perfectionism goes deeper than wanting perfection for its own sake. Aesthetics to me can feel like the difference between harmony and disharmony, regulation and dysregulation. I feel it deeply either way.

I wrote the draft, wrote the second book, and drafted the series outline. Then, before moving forward, I began to read books. Books on motherhood, children’s books, books on ecology, horticulture, citrus trees, mycorrhizal networks. I researched, read, watched videos, searched online. 

I did not pick up the pencil.

Perfectionism disguises itself as care. When something matters so much, I believe it deserves ideal conditions, more time, more research, more refinement. Sometimes that prevents it from existing at all.

At first I couldn’t wait to finally have the story written. I know I can draw. Yet that was the part I delayed. Because I’m trained, I’m afraid of disappointing myself with what I produce. I’m afraid it won’t be what’s in my head, even though I know I am capable of producing good work.

At baby showers there’s a common activity where everyone draws a picture to represent a letter of the alphabet. Instead of finding it relaxing, I find it stressful. I don’t want to draw. I choose simple words—Q is for Q-tip—or try shortcuts, like tracing. I is for Icarus. I still find something wrong with it.

I went to a shower that had the alphabet activity, but this time the drawings were already done, like coloring book pages. I was relieved.

I visited the preserve and my garden. I identified plants with an app. When we bought our first home, I fell into the same pattern with drywall patching. I watched videos to learn proper technique and the correct materials to use. I bought the materials. I watched more videos. I got pregnant and couldn’t finish patching the holes myself. Now I just needed it done before my baby arrived. 

I’ve had many side quests since the inception of this book. I jotted down more notes and ideas for the series structure. Scenes and lines to include. I researched publishing and printers. I tinkered with the website. I bought extension tubes for my camera. I wrote a 30-page party planning guide and told myself it was important to do this first, and then at last I could draw. I brainstormed eventual variations: board books, soft books, miniature books, boxed sets. I thought about entries I’d write, stationery I’d create, activities I’d construct. Writing this entry is even a form of procrastination. I am actively fighting the urge to edit and refine it further. As long as I stay close to the project, I can tell myself I am working on the project without actually moving the heart of it forward. I have no deadline to rush to. No one is here to tell me I’m holding myself back. 

This project began as a gift for my son. I wanted it to look like something that belongs on his bookshelf. Somewhere along the way it took on meaning beyond a gift to say how much I love him. How could I think I was creating something outside of myself when my story has been entwined all along? I am stirred into the mix and something has formed that both fuels me and exposes me. At times I wonder: is it for my son, or is it for myself now? The motives are enmeshed, but that’s what makes it more whole. 

I want to keep the seed in my hand. It is safe. In my hand the soil is the right pH; the sun shines exactly as I need it; the garden design concept stays in pencil only, malleable with an eraser; I never miss a watering; there’s another horticulture book I can read. It is its fullest potential, the idealization of what it could be, and so it is not really its potential at all.

So this is me planting the seed in the world. Sowing into the earth before I am ready to let it go. I will tend it and it will grow. 

Maybe not as I imagined, but one day it will bloom. 

Thank you for witnessing.