Pattern 1: Perfectionism, by Heather Manwaring

Ah, to be perfect. Isn’t that what everyone wants? A world where no one makes mistakes, there’s no war, zero conflict, and perfectly beautiful art everywhere? It’s interesting - this ideal. The desire to never be off-put or see anything ugly, to get along all the time, to agree on everything…because who says what is perfect? Don’t we all have a different idea of what that actually looks like and means? Ultimately, while it seems like we are all in pursuit of something admirable, in my experience it is actually a societally accepted prison. 

My prison started at home. While most of what I picked up on was unspoken, it didn’t change the fact that my little system had to adapt to and survive a painfully chaotic environment, and that little system learned quite early on that there was a specific way to be and not be to get love (that we all need to survive). 

Try as I might, I failed at that, often. It created this pattern in me of trying so hard, only to fail miserably and still not get my needs met. It created a pattern in me of working overtime for the love and approval I needed, only to feel like I fell short constantly. And thus, perfectionism was born. If I could just be perfect, everything would be better. Love became conditional upon a certain set of behaviors and ways of thinking that didn’t rock the boat so hard. 

And to be clear, I very much rocked the boat, naturally, just by being. 

However, from this standpoint, what I was trying to be was something completely impossible and unreachable. It simply doesn’t exist. I was not perfect by any means, so the mark kept moving. The conditions kept changing. And at some point, what was once a set of survival patterns to get love from my family became my way of relating to myself and the entire world, in nearly every area of my life. 

I played the same roles I did as a kid with my parents, and re-enacted childhood wounds with everyone - friends, teachers, clients, lovers, and perpetuated them in my family system. When people would inevitably be angry with or judge me, I took all of it as proof that I was a terrible person. It reinforced the belief that I was inherently bad and wrong and should be different. No matter what I did, this was still my baseline. 

I felt like the worst human on earth. I internalized this failure to be perfect as shameful, and blamed it as the reason I was so alone. I felt like I deserved all the punishment I received, and it pushed me harder and harder to fix myself. To do things differently, but from a place of self-hatred and judgment, and a desperate need for love and approval from everyone around me. 

Whew, sometimes I forget that this was once my lived reality, and I feel sad that I carried something so impossibly heavy. 

In many ways, art became my refuge. I know so many people feel their perfectionism pop up with their creations, but for me - it was the one place that was safe for me to be messy. To splatter paint everywhere and let myself have angry and chaotic brushstrokes that fully captured

the state of my internal world. To create something beautiful with something so painful and heavy and confusing and hard, and let (some) people see it. But mostly to really let MYSELF see it on a canvas, outside of me for once–and so it stopped living only on the inside in a way that was slowly eating away at me. 

Art was the healthy outlet for me to channel everything I was feeling that couldn’t be put to words. And, from 18-23, I had a really hard time sharing my creations with the world. I wanted to hoard them and keep them mostly hidden away, pray a few loving eyes. For a long time it was just for me, which on one hand is absolutely fine and rightful, but there came a time where I started feeling the nudge to include more people into my creative world. 

That scared the living daylights out of me. I felt like I could no longer hide, which felt like a death sentence to that scared and lonely version of me. I knew my creations were no longer just for me - that they were asking to be shared, felt, generously given outward to heal and impact others. 

That was the first time I felt my creative life and my relationship trauma clash and collide into each other. I could no longer compartmentalize them. I was 24 when I received that very clear and scary nudge, and it was that nudge that pushed me towards photography. It was a way for me to start including people in my art that made me get out of the attic (literally) and try to make people understand what I was trying to create and explain my medicine before I really knew it was going to be a huge part of my medicine. 

All of a sudden, the permission I had for my art to be messy bled into all my relationships, whether I liked it or not. People received that permission and let themselves be messy in a way I had yet to give myself in relationship. And of course, I had to let it work and impact me the way it was working and impacting others. I loved other people’s mess before I knew how to love my own. This is how I know something bigger was guiding me, because if I had had it all my way, I would have never made this decision on my own and likely stayed in my grandmother’s attic for much longer than was actually true for me to stay. 

It was an initiation into my true lifepath–my very beginning into a life of service that I had resisted for years. All of this unfelt anger started coming out of me like wildfire, and it burned a path forward I never thought I would walk down. Feeling that anger was the next iteration of my photography work, the next layer of permission for others to feel, the next expression of what I needed to heal in relationship to myself and others. And fuck–it was super, super messy at first. All of it. It was messy and painful and beautiful and expansive and scary. It was a whole experience. 

Regardless of how much drama it created, it was the first time I felt closer to myself. Where I started seeing people come closer to me WITH all that anger still inside, because I was willing to be with the truth of where I was and how I was feeling. Where I definitely wasn’t perfect, and some people still loved me. I had a boyfriend at the time who could hold it and still choose me after a big fight. It had a huge impact that I had to clean up, but it was really the first time I had

experienced someone staying with me through the mess, because I was finally staying with myself in the mess and confronting that belief head on. 

While I could continue this entire story up to present, what I really want you to know about this is that it all really boiled down to me choosing myself - no matter how scary, painful, confusing, and risky that felt at the time. I had to choose myself over everything, and everything that decision and commitment entailed (like a higher calling that terrified me). And yes, even all that I had to lose to find myself. 

I have had to be willing to listen to and follow a deeper, pulsing truth inside of me every step of the way. In the face of misunderstanding, ugliness, paralyzing fear, and disconnection. It has been the most important thing to me for the last ten years (now at 34), to choose that over and over and over. To the point where perfection is no longer the goal. Where I embrace the glorious mess that it is to be human and have relationships with other imperfect humans, and accept and be with what is–to fully see the beauty in everything that comes my way. 

Through this dedication, I have been able to create healthy and gorgeous relationships now based on mutual respect, generous support, and shared values, versus childhood wound re-enactments and shared pain. The joy and fulfillment these current relationships bring me is beyond anything I ever imagined for myself. I feel seen and known and loved for exactly who and what I am, warts and all. Loved for things I used to hide, hoping no one would see or know about me. And they are STILL not perfect - but they are real, and that’s all I need now. 

The truth that I wish I knew sooner, is that relationships are the most potent mirrors and catalysts for growth. Places where all of your wounding inevitably gets touched - where you can see yourself clearly, should you choose to, and start to do the grueling work of collecting all the lost, imperfect parts you rejected and blamed as the reasons you can’t have what you want in life. Not to finally be perfect. But to be whole, connected, and real - out of love for yourself and other, not punishment and hate. 

And I guess in this way, our creative energy and consequential creations can be this for us too. I see my creative world as an extensive system of relationships. Art in and of itself has simply been a cleaner and purer mirror for me, with less shit in the way. But relationships? Those are the juicy parts of life - the things that make life feel worth living, that deepen my life with richness and beauty, and also scare the shit out of me. Relationships are an art form entirely their own, and I’ve simply learned how to make more masterful strokes and clean up the splats when they happen. 

It scares me to write this the way I have. I feel the fear of all of this intimacy right now. And yet, here I am, pulsing with aliveness and feeling, in all of my imperfect glory, wanting to connect with you in all of yours. 

And perhaps there is a certain kind of perfection in that.