When I used to take art classes, my art teacher would always note my ability to overwork a piece. Poised to add another paint stroke or preparing to lift some pencil marks to create more contrast, my art teacher would say, "I think you're done."
I seldom feel satisfied with any of my own work--there's always room to make it better. I am constantly making mental notes and sometimes literal ones on how to improve my work. This past school year, my House Council co-advisor and I organized the school talent show. As I sat in the rear of the cafetorium getting ready to activate our polling system on my laptop, I opened a document and started listing all the improvements we needed to make for next year.
For the past four months I've been looking at three unfinished posts. Unable to really form them into something I deem worthwhile yet unwilling to move past them. As I sat on the ferry boat, looking at my bookmarked novel, I decided to go back to one of the drafts to tinker, to edit and to overwork. Navigating on my small phone screen, I highlighted a few sentences to move, in hopes to somehow correct the flow or create a flow. In the midst of cutting and pasting, the Wi-Fi connection cut out for a moment and then returned, and the next thing I knew Blogger was now saving a blank white page.
Mother effing pus bucket!
I violently tapped the undo button to no avail. It couldn't be undone. What was done was done.
I was pissed. For the past four months, I've been fiddling with that piece of writing or more accurately that piece of writing has been fiddling with me. I thought back to a painting I started and nearly completed many years ago. One evening, as my art teacher stood behind me silently scrutinizing my work, I began to complain about how much I hated my painting. She responded, "Paint over it then." I turned around and looked at her in disbelief. She knew how many hours I had already invested in this painting. Shouldn't she be encouraging me to finish my work or showing me how to fix it? But she had noted my half-hearted effort for weeks and knew I just wasn't into it. And soon I realized she was right. The next week at my art class, I applied a thick coat of gesso over the canvas obliterating the physical representation of hours of my time. I think about how my teacher could have just handed me a new canvas, but she recognized the importance of me covering over my work. As I painted over the little girl standing near a lake in a half finished field of flowers, I didn't feel a sense of failure but a sense of relief, and two months later I finished a new painting on that same canvas.
After completing a Google search on how to retrieve a lost draft from Blogger, which I learned was impossible, I looked at the white space, the clean canvas, and started over. After about thirty minutes of nearly continuous writing, I was already happier with what I now read on the screen. A technical glitch had saved me from myself.
While I truly value hard work and perseverance, there are times when it's good to give up, move on and start fresh. If you are a stubborn, persistent borderline perfectionist who sees asking for help as a sign of weakness, well, you need to take a step back and consider whether pushing through is going to leave you feeling happy and satisfied or just frustrated and fruitless.
