on the mis-uses of perfection

or, a thing I've been thinkin' about lately

Dear reader,

I want to tell you about something I’ve been wondering on the last little while.

I’ve actually wondered about it a lot over the years.

It’s a kind of friction I’ve felt since I was a very little girl: that in my personal spaces, I prefer the comforting clutter of imperfect things over the tidiness and minimalism of perfect things.

When I was growing up, I wasn’t allowed to hang anything on the walls. Tiny holes and tape marks in the paint drove my dad nuts and so, instead of hanging anything on the wall, I had blank walls. Instead of posters and ticket stubs and magazine covers smacked on the walls, I had clean walls in the most buttery yellow color (which I got to help pick out) that matched the buttery yellows and blues in my favorite butterfly quilt.

It was beautiful. Especially in the summers, when the sunlight would streak in through my bedroom window and tinge the entire wall behind my bed a glorious orange color — a rusty, buttery, sunset orange that looked so rich, I wanted to taste it.

And yet it is perhaps no surprise that, as an adult, my walls are covered in framed art, unframed art, string lights and pom garlands held up by thumbtacks, little rectangle-shaped bookshelves with nooks I can put rocks and little pots and shells and trinkets inside. There are lithographs and photographs from the women at the farmer’s market who make such beautiful and odd things.

There are old polaroids of trees and potted succulents nested into these amazing plant hangers I got from a random girl on Instagram years ago (she taught herself welding during the first covid shutdown, which is badass). Tape marks abound; nothing is hung with a ruler or level. There are baseball hats on haphazard hooks and purses hanging at differing heights.

Off the walls, and on the shelves and desk and even the floor, there are dozens of misshapen projects from my pottery classes; there’s a tortoise-shell glass lamp and little rings from wherever my iced tea perspires; there are so many half-burned candles.

There are half-finished paintings (which I honestly kind of prefer that way) and notebooks turned to the latest journal entry. There are post-it notes on the wall, on the computer monitor, on the bookshelf with everything from work reminders to things my therapist asks me to remember to cryptic epiphanies I have while reading:

Hold the dog; dissipate him.

Is Ellen Olenska true intellectual of AoI, re: Foucault?

Think of 1978 definition —

Submit $ by EOM

No one gets to have an opinion about your worth

You get to choose

There are pencils sharpened down to the smallest they can get before they stop fitting into my pencil sharpener.

A few too many unopened bills — I’m sure I have a digital copy somewhere. A stack of books I meant to give away but then put by the door and never moved again. The smoothest rock I’ve ever felt that is the exact shape of my palm as it closes and is a pure pleasure to hold. Silly putty. Three sets of headphones: one in-ear, one over-the-ear, one corded because you never know which the situation will call for.

There is a paint palette I can’t bear to wash because the colors I mixed by accident very late one night are way too pretty. There is the essay on culture I loved in The London Review of Books last year that I propped up against the wall; across from it, on the other wall, is a letterpress drawer I cleaned and polished and filled up with tiny treasures (mostly little gemstones, mostly gifted to me). Sometimes, one or both of my cats will sit in front of the drawer and paw each trinket out onto the floor. I think this is an enriching activity for them, so I don’t move the drawer.

There is old rock climbing gear that I’ll use again someday, I swear, and my little banana-shaped bag of Bananagrams that I get out as often as anyone agrees to play with me.

Moleskines stacked on their side, in order of the year I completed them, sit between the heavy, rabbit-shaped bookends I saw in a garden shop one day and received as a gift the next day from a person I haven’t spoken to in twelve years. There’s the pile of books on depression and how to navigate it, which I carefully read and annotated and do not want to read again. Framed family photos from when I was a tiny baby and from when I was in college and from just a year ago. The cutest handmade birthday cards from my nieces, who just learned how to make pop-up cards, and who love to draw pictures of my cats.

What I’m saying is: I am surrounded by messes and imperfections and handmade things — teetering cairns pointing the ways I’ve gone and the paths I’ve tread and how me I’ve always been.

What I’m saying is, I like the evidence.

What I’m saying is: I like how much all of this reflects that self who didn’t want to be and didn’t know how to be and never wanted to be perfect. Looking around this room, I see her clear as day.

And, as you perhaps know well, there’s nothing like being seen.

I’ve been putting out a bit more personal writing lately. Here are some recent pieces, in case you missed them. See you later this week for the next read-a-long guide!

a day at the art institute

35 books I love

in my corner of the world