I’m approaching the end of my vignette collection. It feels very strange to be saying this and a part of me doesn’t believe it. I’m not too good at shouting out my excitement with my friends and family. I don’t think I’m good at shouting it to myself.
I’m partially prone to thinking that project take a lot longer than they do. I think that’s because I believe that things require tens of revisions before they’re done. That none of my work will be good enough to be shared. I’m trying to stop that tendency for perfectionism and just respect where my skills are at. I remember watching a Corridor Digital video a couple years ago, about how they gave themselves shorter deadlines to finish projects. If a project wasn’t good enough, it didn’t matter. They needed to publish it within their given timeline, because it was more important to get the work out there and then learn from their mistakes. They would take those mistakes and then apply their new knowledge to future projects.
I always appreciated that sentiment (though I was never that good at following it). Sometimes our skills aren’t where we want them to be, but it does no good to keep our work as something precious and secret. It’s more important to finish something and learn from it.
The vignette collection has been a long time coming. There will always be a part of me that wishes I had done something better and I’d want it to get to as close to perfect as possible. However, my therapist said something interesting the other day. “Nobody knows your version of perfect. What you send out into the world is already pretty great and might be perfect to them.”
So I need to take it in. The final days or weeks of me totally revising the vignette collection. I love this feeling, everything culminating together. Then all at once, c’est fin.