everything we do is sacred: abandoning perfectionism for rigor

notes on abandoning rigidity in service of collective liberation.

At age eleven, I convinced myself that my mother’s shattering grief could be made manageable if only she were unburdened by the stress of raising her youngest children. If I behaved, did well in school, didn’t need anything, then she would eventually get better. At least that’s how I remember it. It’s just as likely that the grief won early, and my kid brain dressed the emotional absence in the costume of caretaking. Either way, I became still, exceptional, and self-reliant too soon.

It didn’t take long for my self-abandonment to become a personality trait. The more the people around me rewarded it, the harder it became to see what lived underneath all my discipline. I mistook my perfectionism for high standards, and by reaching for the unattainable, I trained myself to see everything as unacceptable—even myself. This is how perfectionism killed my creativity.

No matter the medium, what sets us apart as artists is our point of view, what we insist is worth seeing, saying, and showing. The engine of creation, then, is faith that our perspective matters: that what I know to be true can meet what you know to be true, and in that contact transform us both. But to actualize our truths (creative visions), we’re asked to begin before we’re ready, and let our work be met, requiring our failure, integration, and iteration. So, what happens when this fear of imperfection cuts us off from the messy, unfinished processes that bring our visions to life? Self-censorship. Our fear denies our work the space it needs to transform us, others, and, in turn, itself. And like my mother, Source did not consent to our disappearing act. In fact, our creative collaboration with the divine calls us into visibility; we cannot make anything alive while refusing to be seen.

In 2025, I chose the word romance as my anchor. I set out to meet my days and my work with devotion. I called in slowness, attention, pleasure, and reverence. I wanted to peel a grapefruit as if I had time to be alive, to remove pomegranate seeds without bruising them. I wanted to stop living like every moment was a race I hadn’t agreed to run, and I was terrible at it. Urgency, like perfectionism, had made a home in my body. Thankfully, my romantic explorations brought me to understand my own urgency as a manifestation of my perfectionist posture, triggered by the perennial need to be safe from abandonment, embarrassment, and rejection. The inquiry in front of me was clear: how could I maintain discipline without policing myself into inaction? And in my search for a practice that could retrain me to loosen my grip, I found watercolor.

My artistic home has always been mixed media and installation—mediums that allow for structure, layering, and control. Watercolor is different; it demands an unfamiliar surrender, it moves when it moves, it bleeds, it blooms, it punishes overworking, and rewards my patience. It taught me quickly that control is not the same thing as skill. In my first foray into watercolor, I tried to paint a realistic water drop. I watched tutorials and studied reference images. I attempted it twice. Both times, it looked flat to me—stiff, overworked, nothing like what I had imagined, but that was the point, to be bad, until I was better, and to be seen in my learning. So I posted the work publicly for friends and family to see, and (because sometimes the universe is cliché in its lessons) something I wasn’t expecting happened; people responded with warmth, they affirmed my skill, and shared their surprise that I was a beginner!

evidence of practice.

It’s not hard to believe that I would pick up a new medium faster than most beginners, since I’m not starting from zero, but that’s not what surprised me. The moment made it clear to me that perfectionism is a funhouse mirror, and it was projecting my fears onto my work, convincing me it’s unsafe to reveal. For me, practicing public beginnerhood put me in relationship with my community, Spirit, other artists, beloveds, and haters alike, and helped me recalibrate that mirror. From that footing, I’ve found a more rigorous, emergent, and devoted practice, detached from the performance of perfection. I’ve defined rigor for myself as repetition, study, attention, and care applied consistently, with tenderness. When I am being rigorous, I show up to learn from what my creation has to teach me, and I let it change me in the process. Perfectionism holds my creation hostage until my distorted mirror thinks it’s impressive enough to avoid shame. That difference matters beyond my sketchbook because the work in front of us is not only resistance; it’s creation.

We’re fighting what is misaligned with life on this planet, yes, but we’re also responsible for rehearsing our alignment relationally, systemically, and spiritually. As an abolitionist, I often tell people that if we want to abolish the police, we have to start having dinner with our neighbors, not because dinner is policy, but because relationships are the infrastructure making the new world possible. What we’re building won’t arrive through our flawless ideology; it’ll come to be through experimentation, practiced care, and practiced repair. Perfectionism makes that impossible, turning every misunderstanding into a moral failure, every imperfect intervention inactionable, and every conflict into a reason to disappear. The discipline we need looks more like staying: staying in the learning, staying in the feedback, staying in the work of becoming trustworthy to ourselves and each other.

We have a responsibility to find the places within us where the world has sown rigidity and abandon the distortions of perfectionism for a rigor that centers the ongoing, imperfect work of creation and collective liberation. We can create safety in our bodies by (1) learning to be tender with ourselves so that we may be loving in our corrections to others, and (2) building up our nervous system to sustain staying.

In the midst of an apocalypse, I invite you to practice being free. Show us what you’re bad at, where you’re struggling, the thing you just can’t get “right”; now is the time.

This is the time

For you to deeply compute the impossibility

That there is anything

But Grace.

Now is the season to know

That everything you do

Is sacred.

— Hafiz