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embracing imperfection

Apr 19, 2024

Hey! This is The Guidelines. I’m korick, or k.c., either way. Here I write about my journey of recovery and creativity. Every week I write poems or essays about what I am learning, experiencing, and practicing as I gratefully work to live a full, healthy, and creative life.

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Some of my fondest memories are of playing music. I often reminisce on the long nights we’d spend in the basement bouncing around from instrument to instrument, melody to melody, flow to flow. It was freeing. The world would melt away. In those moments, the rhythm of the drums, my fingers dancing across the fretboard, the rumblings of the bass would all give way to something greater than themselves. It was a feeling of release, of connection, that felt otherworldly, out-of-body, unstoppable, incorruptible.

When we were in that flow, it felt like the music was coming through us from somewhere or someone else. We’d often come to the end of some impromptu arrangement and look around the room, glance at each other, and burst out in a fit of laughter that was the only way to express our disbelief in what just occurred.

Those jam sessions were transcendent experiences, in a spiritual and a practical sense. I miss those moments. They were childlike. We didn’t care what the world thought. We were just having fun. Of course we thought we were the shit. But we didn’t jam for our ego, to prove ourselves to an audience of gawking fans. We did it for us. Because it was fun.

I think much of my adult life since can be summed up as me flailing around, headless chicken style, looking for anything that can help me escape from the world into that feeling of flow. And for better and for worse, I found some ways to get there. I’ve approached flow a few times when I write, emotion pouring itself onto a page while hours tick away. I’ve felt it on long runs, when the road ahead merges with earth itself and footstrikes feel lighter and lighter. I’ve found approximations of it at the bottom of cans of PBR and in the glowing cherry on the tip of a joint.

I know now that drugs and alcohol were always going to be but a cheap imitation, but with the other forms of art and expression I’ve gravitated towards, something has always felt like it was missing.

Maybe it’s because I do a lot of these things solo. Writing, cooking, and running, tend to be individual activities for me. Maybe it’s because I’m not as good, far less well practiced, at them than I was at guitar. I constantly feel like I have to try a little harder, perhaps because the muscle memory, and the cosmic connection, aren’t as well established. Maybe this simply isn’t what I am supposed to be doing. Maybe there’s another art form I should be embracing. Maybe I should stop trying all these other things and just play music, but whenever I’ve done that, I always feel lost without the bandmates who made the music possible, doomed to seek a feeling that was always fleeting to begin with.

Maybe all of that is just an excuse. Maybe the real problem is an ego run-amok, parading around with something to prove, sucking all the fun out of everything, and turning everything into work. Instead of doing things for me, for the thrill of it in and of itself, like the way we played music in those jam sessions, I’ve been doing them for my ego, hoping to write the thing that goes viral, that gathers a ton of subscriptions, that validates my talent as a wordsmith.

But that shit is stressful and the only art that’s come from the ego has been forced, derivative, and self-indulged.

We didn’t have an audience when we played music in the basement. It was simply a moment to play, to have fun, to let go of the world. And that’s what creation is all about. Playing music is fun. Running is fun. Writing clever lines and well-crafted sentences are fun. Creativity should be fun. When it’s not, there’s a problem.

I understand the need to show up consistently, to work through the tough moments until there’s a breakthrough, to fight the war of art. But if you’re not having a good time doing it, then what’s the point?

Something I have been working on is accepting imperfection. I have a toxic relationship with the backspace button. No matter how far away I get from it, how deep into a sentence I get, I constantly find myself running back to it, smashing it over and over again until I craft what must be a perfect sentence. But all the backspacing is just a manifestation of perfectionism, of ego, it’s me being too critical of myself and sucking all the fun out of writing.

I wasn’t always like that with music. Missing a note didn’t always mean starting a song over or packing up the whole jam session. Sometimes it did, but that’s why we practice. I’m trying to apply that same mentality to writing. I’m learning to trust my pen, trust that the words will end up where they are supposed to, believe there is something worth saying beyond the first line. This will come with practice, with more skill, more mastery and it will come with less ego, less perfectionism, and a less desire to control the process and its outcomes.

Recently I’ve started to spend more time writing with a pen and pad versus the keyboard. I find that I am a lot more forgiving of mistakes when I handwrite, less focused on constructing the perfect sentence, and more so on expressing the thought or feeling at hand. It’s harder to backspace on a notebook. And when I do feel a need to edit, I find the act of crossing something out – sometimes rather intensely – to be very cathartic.

Accepting imperfection makes writing fun. Instead of agonizing over the perfect sentence, I just roll on through. It’s a lot more rewarding to have a completed piece than to stare at a blinking cursor. There’s always time to edit later.

Handwriting is also simply more fun to me at the moment. I like switching between cursive and print. It’s fun to pause and doodle. I’m finding so many more twists and turns outside of the constraints of 12-point Garamond and 1” margins. So I’ll keep doing that because that’s what feels good right now.

I’m also learning to accept that the feeling of flow is impermanent. Just as no high was going to last forever, no buzz a lifetime, no melody or stanza will ever permanently release me from the ebbs and flows of daily life. Spending hours trying to find the right word isn’t going to make the feeling I get from writing it last forever. I have to understand that the moments of flow are only as magical as they are because of the moments of drudgery that precede and follow them, which is a good lesson for art and an even better one for living.

Play itself is impermanent. That is what makes it fun. When you let go, you make room for a lot more of these impermanent moments to arise instead of holding on so tightly to the possibility of one singular moment.

Perfectionism is the opposite of play. You won’t find much fun searching for perfection (just ask Handsome Squidward). The endless nitpicking is disheartening, boring, and overwhelmingly tedious. It’s an ego-driven pursuit that’s more concerned with outcomes than anything else. But outcomes just give way to more outcomes — more clicks, subscriptions, and views — all to feed the ego. That stuff, and the feeling you get from it, is impermanent too.

I say fuck it, let’s play.

What comes from that is what comes from that.

food for thought

All art is a work in progress. It’s helpful to see the piece we’re working on as an experiment. One in which we can’t predict the outcome. Whatever the result, we will receive useful information that will benefit the next experiment. If you start from the position that there is no right or wrong, no good or bad, and creativity is just free play with no rules, it’s easier to submerge yourself joyfully in the process of making things. We’re not playing to win, we’re playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun. Perfectionism gets in the way of fun.

Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

a journal prompt for you

How can you find time to play today?

If you do write something and you would like to share it, I’d love to read it. You can send it to theguidelines@substack.com or leave a comment.

korick is…

korick is reading The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin. I like this video from YouTuber HINDZ where he reads from the book too.
korick is watching Floberg Runs run the Boston Marathon.
korick is listening to The Tortured Poets Department by Taylor Swift.
korick is paying attention to rap beefs and boxing matches.