Practice.
A quiet room, a chair, and a stressed out person. Eyes so tired of looking at the same sheet music over and over, nitpicking each and every sound that comes out of their mouth.
It has to be perfect. Practice makes perfect, they say. They say the wrong things. They say lethal whispers in an artist’s ear with no realization of ever doing so.
The artist practices and practices over and over, striving for that perfection they were promised long ago in elementary school when they learned that phrase. Practice makes perfect, practice makes perfect. And they do not receive it.
Like a hiker getting hit by a tornado of wind on a mountain, they are swept right out from under their feet and fall down. Down. Down.
The artist loses interest in their talents because practice makes perfect when it does not. Why do we feed such terrible things into our brains? We are not robots. We cannot be perfect. We can only be. We can only try our bests.
Practice does not make perfect, it makes permanent.
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Cassandra, this was such an amazing post! I consider myself an artist (in singing, writing, and drawing) and on top of that I have OCD, so I really struggle with this idea of perfection. But you're right; perfection can't be achieved, so it's healthier to teach artists that practice is a tool used to improve, not to achieve something "perfect." Thanks for understanding!
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