In all aspects of life, I unfortunately happen to be a perfectionist.
When I say unfortunately, I know that may seem harsh because inherently, there is nothing wrong with being a perfectionist. On top of that, there are tons of us all over the globe!
My perfectionist habits have seemed to seep into my life ever since I was little. I was a big artist as a kid, loving coloring books and all kinds of different drawing materials. If you were to open my coloring books from when I was around 5 or 6, you’d see crayon purposefully placed with no single stroke outside the lines.
I would get inches away from the beige-colored paper of the pages of the coloring book to ensure there was not a single colorful speck that happened to lay outside of the bold black future-determining lines, according to my 5-year-old brain. Eventually, I began switching over to colored pencils because they were more precise and easier to sharpen than a crayon (if you’ve ever tried to sharpen a crayon, you know it doesn’t ever work as well as one wishes it would).
When working with pre-k students this summer, I would watch them carelessly choose a crayon and scribble all over the page and it made them so giddy. We’d practice writing their name at the top and then slide the colorful squiggles home with them. Notes from parents telling us how much they loved them were always sent back with the students the next morning. One morning, we got notes from almost every parent.
That night, I went home and dug out all of my old coloring books. I flipped through them at a painfully slow rate, taking in the perfection of every page. While I was astonished, I also felt a strange wave of sadness which may seem out of place, but I remembered the feeling of worrying while I was filling the color in so carefully between the black lines.
Coloring was supposed to be fun, not work, and not something I stressed over. It was not something I needed to make absolutely positively perfect.
So, I went to look for my colored pencils. As soon as I found them and held them in my hand, I put them back down immediately and started digging all the way to the back of the shelves. I finally touched the familiar plastic and yanked it free.
The tub of crayons was covered in stickers of Dora the Explorer, Doc McStuffins, and Disney princesses. I opened the lid and dumped out a few and just started scribbling without caring if the strokes ended up inside the lines or not. I finished when there was a rainbow of squiggles and signed my name at the top.
I waltzed into the living room and presented my ripped-out page to my mom. She was a bit confused but eventually stood up and walked to the kitchen and stuck it to the fridge.
Though I felt a bit silly doing it and I still feel a bit silly recounting it, it was very liberating and allowed me to let go of a portion of that mentality that everything needs to constantly be perfect, even if it’s something as little as using a crayon.