Mild Shenanigans Between the Zines: Do What You Do, How You Do!

V4, I26

Three and one half years, yo!¹

One of my favorite funk songs is “Express Yourself” by Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band. Right in the middle, he drops this brain-twister of a lyric:

It's not what you look like when you're doing' what you're doing.

It's what you're doing when you're doing what you look like you're doing.

That Charles sure had a way with a lyric line, didn’t he?² His point, though, was pretty strong: You don’t have to do it pretty, so long as you do it. Whatever “it” is.³

Easier written than done, though, at least in my case? I’ve always been one of those folks who would not let go of something I made unless I wrapped it in a massive ball of caveats:

• “I hope this works for you. I wish I had another week to get it just right.”

• “It’s okay, but if I had another couple of days, it would be better.”

• “I guess it’s fine.

• “Please don’t hold this against me.”

• “I know other people who could have done it better for you.”

I suppose we call that perfectionism⁴, but I wasn’t after making everything the best I could; I was after making everything the best anyone had ever seen, ever ever. That’s perfectionism run through a filter of more perfectionism, simmered down to a perfectionist reduction, and drizzled over the most perfect perfectionist cake. I didn’t just want the things I made to be great; I wanted them to shine with undeniable flawlessness and gleamed with the harsh light of an ice-white star.

Yeah. That was going to happen.

Of course there were reasons I lashed myself with that particular whip. There still are. I’m not going to tell you I’m over it all, because I don’t want to lie to you. I still believe the hype I heard from plenty of grownup teachers and school administrators who used to ooh and aah over my achievements tests. I was a genius kid and they weren’t shy about saying so where I could hear it. They’d talk about potential and all the things I could do when I grew up and, well, here I am, carrying all that weight. Still.

But I’m carrying it a lot more lightly than I never have before. I’m learning, more each week, to live with the gap between the vision of my art I see in my head and what my flawed human hands can produce. I’m growing more and more okay with the necessary translation errors between beautiful potential and attainable reality. This newsletter and the weird little changes I’ve made over the past couple weeks have been a fine exercise in being okay with imperfection.

So here’s where you come in. If crazy ol’ me can make art that can’t ever be perfect, so can you. If I can shift the “brand” of a newsletter I’ve carried on for 3 1/2 years on a dime, without a whole bunch of market studies, A/B testing, and polls about possible names and whatnot, then you can shift the stuff that isn’t quite working the way you want it to.

Adjusting on the fly, especially when it comes to creative deeds, is tricky. It requires a certain amount of “oh, what the heck” attitude that isn’t always in huge supply. You have it in you, though. Just do what you do how you do when you do.

You know, like the song kind of says.

Cool? Cool.

Now, how about a little audio treat?

1. I have nothing else to say about 183 newsletters in a row other than to note it with a fist-pump you can’t see because you’re not here. If you were, you could have requested, and received, the highest of fives.

2. Wright also wrote the hip-shaker “Do Your Thing”, which featured the transcendent lyric, “Everybody get on the floor.

Do your thing.

Everybody get on the floor.

Do your thing.

Whatever it is.”

3. There are, of course, obvious exceptions. Olympic figure skating, for example. Portrait painting as well, I assume.

4. And we usually do. Oddly enough, perfectionism doesn’t seek to make things perfect, because our brains kind of know that we can’t attain perfection. What perfection really seeks is to delay the inevitable rejection our work will face by coming up with a convenient excuse to never finish it. In other words, our brain tells us that we need to tweak just that one little bit before it’s ready because, really, it doesn’t want to face the reality that not everyone will love this amazing thing into which we’ve poured our very heart.