Please Don't Hire Me to Paint Your House

Every morning I walk out of my room into the hallway that I painted three weeks ago and find another flaw. I missed a spot in the corner by the basement door, right above the baseboard. Last Wednesday I started to notice the visible roller strokes. This morning I saw the old beige color peek through the fresh gray surrounding the outlet covers. Each day another glaring mistake waves "good morning" to me.

I went to a jazz concert last April. From what I vaguely remember, it was wonderful. I'm a big fan of jazz and I remember being very pleased. The one thing I do recall with great clarity from that night is when the singer came in 4 bars too early in one song. She was an excellent singer, singing flawlessly and effortlessly throughout the entire concert, save for that one mistake. But that's what I remembered.

I'm not telling you these stories to broadcast that I'm a careless painter or a horribly judgmental person. Well, not entirely. Stories like these are symptoms of a horrid disease called perfectionism and it is my Resistance.

In his book "The War of Art," author, Steven Pressfield defines Resistance as the force that keeps a person from becoming the person that he or she could be. Resistance takes many other forms besides perfectionism. It is whatever force keeps writers from writing, artists from painting, entrepreneurs from starting a venture, teachers from teaching, etc. Isn't it crazy to think that there are poets out there who have never written a poem? Or missionaries who have never gone on a missions trip? That's the mark Resistance leaves on the world: a massive graveyard of potential.

Somewhere along the line, my small child brain bought into the idea that nothing is good unless it's perfect. From then on, every mistake, flaw, oversight, and imperfection basically became personified and started shouting mean names at me. Anticipation of this phenomenon turned into a fear of failure. Fear of failure turned me into a paralyzed, uncreative-creative.

As you can imagine, a creative living an uncreative life is very frustrating. (Side note: I kind of hate the term 'creative' because it has pompous connotations but I'm on a mission to reform it.) Anything that is not fulfilling its purpose feels utterly useless. That's another symptom of Resistance: lack of emotional stimulation. I have a theory that if we fought our Resistance and started doing the work we were cut out to do, we would all do a lot less Netflix binging.

I don't necessarily subscribe to the belief that our purpose is one specific task that we need to have nightmares about missing out on. People are much too dynamic to be pigeonholed like that. What I do believe is that one of the major themes of the human experience is overcoming obstacles in search of a higher calling.

Every good and noble thing worth pursuing is guaranteed to come with an army of forces trying to stand in the way of its manifestation. I think that was included in the "Terms of Service" to being human we involuntarily signed when we were born, along with death, taxes, and an increasing impulse to talk about our dietary restrictions as we age.

But purpose is worth the toil. Purpose feels like home. Creating is one of my confirmed purposes. Among a number of other reasons, I know this because when I'm creating I feel like a drummer playing in the pocket. I feel powerful. I feel like I'm operating out of some higher force. I feel both the weight of potential and the confidence to bring about the desired finished product.

Unaware, the perfectionistic lenses through which I see the world lead me to living a massively sterile life, devoid of passion. However, I don't think overcoming my Resistance means taking off those lenses. I think it means taking the leap of faith anyway; choosing to see the imperfections as an inseparable and vital part of the product. The key to my purpose-filled freedom is seeing imperfection not as a "despite of" but as an "along with."

I wonder how different our lives would look if instead of playing defense to the birth of our fears, we bravely operated out of a sense of purpose and calling.