Language as Nourishment
Words to carry throughout the week.
"Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and lose sight of the whole. Instead of creating freely and allowing errors to reveal themselves later as insights, we often get mired in getting the details right.
A painting is never finished. It simply stops at interesting places. A book is never finished. But at a certain point you stop writing it and go on to the next thing. That is a normal part of creativity—letting go. We always do the best that we can by the light we have to see by.
Question: What would I do if I didn’t have to do it perfectly?
Answer: A great deal more than I am.”
— Julia Cameron
Timothy McSweeney: Why write poetry?
Rebecca Lindenberg: I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you “have something to say.” I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say. Poetry allows us to hold many related tangential notions in very close orbit around each other at the same time. The “unsayable” thing at the center of the poem becomes visible to the poet and reader in the same way that dark matter becomes visible to the astrophysicist. You can’t see it, but by measure of its effect on the visible, it can become so precise a silhouette you can almost know it.
A McSweeney’s Books Q&A with Rebecca Lindenberg, Author of Love, An Index
“You have to love you right. That’s all you got. Even when everybody else is bent on loving you wrong, and wrong begins to look like it’s not that wrong, you got to love yourself right. Especially then. And you got to do it in public. You got to do it where everybody can notice and say, That girl there? She love herself. She love herself like she teaching a class in loving herself.” — Asha Bandele, Author of Daughter
“Stop thinking so hard about everything, stop overanalyzing. Just go. Just do. If it feels right, just go with the flow. If it feels wrong, don’t think about it anymore and walk away.” — Unknown