The right pen

I’ve been noticing, over the last few months, just how much I’m ruled by perfectionism.

It’s not in the job interview sense, in which one is asked what one’s weakness is and one answers “perfectionism,” indicating thereby a focus on detail and getting everything right. No, when I’m talking about perfectionism, I’m talking about the kind of paralysis and avoidance that appear as if by magic when something hard shows up. I’m talking about not taking on things that are challenging and expansive because what if I’m bad at them.

Interestingly, I’m willing to be bad at lots of things — new intellectual subjects, for instance. But in those cases, I’m not questioning my ability to learn them, I’m just new at them. Being a beginner doesn’t threaten my sense of myself.

Art, however, is something I both desperately want to do and am laughingly, terribly beginnerish with. Being bad at it brings up all kinds of fears that maybe I really am just a boring left-brained person who ought to stick to her numbers and her spreadsheets and her words because nothing I ever do will ever be anything other than awful.

Enter Zentangle

When I discovered Zentangle, a part of me was relieved — it would teach me how to doodle, certainly a first step to figuring things out or at least getting comfortable with the idea of visual expression. While I’m willing to experiment with putting furniture together, fixing computers, and poking at my trigger points, I really really really wanted my hand held with this art thing.

The Zentangle website sells a darling little kit to get you started — instructions on over a dozen patterns, rounded-corner tiles in the perfect size made of the best artists paper, and artist pens with tiny nibs.

Oh, how I wanted the kit. Tiles! Pens! A 20-sided die to help you randomize your pattern choices and get through paralysis! But although I wanted it because, dude, office supplies are pretty much always the bomb, I realized that I really wanted it because then I would do it the right way.

Because there apparently is in my mind a right way and a wrong way to tangle, even though they also say that no tangle is a mistake.

So I dug out my thinnest sharpies and one of the many (many!) sketch books I had lying around and started playing.

A one and a two

The first tangle I started got to about the halfway point before I, inexplicably, stopped doing it. One day I was spending obsessive amounts of time squinting and drawing, the next it was sitting next to my elbow all pretty and not finished.

A few weeks later, I was upstairs and wanting desperately to doodle, while my book was downstairs. So I grabbed yet another sketchpad and a regular old roller-ball and went to town.

And about halfway through it, started watching myself put it aside.

When I started asking myself what the hell was going on, here’s what I got:

• But it’s so pretty and if I keep going I might RUIN it!
• And if I ruin it then everyone will KNOW that I’m a terrible artist and they’ll point and laugh!

So the monsters and I made a deal that if I ruined it I would a) never show anyone and b) never tell anyone. And I could just make another one.

Not ruined, not exactly

There are definitely pieces of the one I posted yesterday that I like less than others. I don’t like that I got ink smudges on it. I’m still learning how to do some of the tangles so they don’t look anemic and weird.

But you know what? I kind of like it anyway.

For the time being, I’m going to keep tangling, keep posting them (goal is one a week), and keep paying attention to that pesky perfectionism. I’d love to know what else I’m not doing because I might not do it perfectly the first time.