I wonder what i'll call it

Pulverise the perfectionist

I’ve been feeling blocked, for quite some time. Blocked from writing, but in fact, blocked in every way. I won’t bore you with the details, suffice to say, blocked. Today I started thinking about when I was happiest writing, and other than the adrenaline-fuelled hours before deadlines in late night cafés and weird wifi-friendly spots around the Récollets - which for some reason have a positive glow around them in retrospect - it was when I was writing the Bunny Rabbit.

In 2010, before I was pregnant and things were free and wild, and I was accepting my acting days were pretty much over, I wanted to write, but didn’t know how. I had no discipline. I would sit and fiddle around with the book, which at that point was a pile of loose anecdotes, notes and stories, and then call it a day, with that lumpish feeling of having achieved nothing. There was nobody waiting for the manuscript, it all felt like a giant void. It was when ‘blogs’ first came about: I’d never read them, people sneered at them as though they were for narcissists and writers that couldn’t get published, so I thought: perfect. The thing was, I needed the feeling of publishing. Instagram wasn’t around yet either, it was facebook posts, and they were short and dull.

Matt always says ‘Self-confidence is in setting yourself small tasks and completing them.’ Something like that. I never set tasks and I never do them. I thought: what if I set myself a small task. I will publish a blog post a day. It will be an artwork - at that time, mine - one of my collages or photos - and a piece of writing. It might be one word, I tell myself, and an old photo, it doesn’t matter, but you must publish something every day. For a year. I think I said a year. I did it for a year, then it started to fall away.

But that year was I think the best writing workshop I’ve attended. I called the blog The Existential Bunny Rabbit, inspired by a Pekka Jylhä postcard I found at the Pompidou, of a taxidermy rabbit staring at itself in the mirror, by candlelight. I adored this image, I bought ten of the same one at a time, for 5 euro, and gave it to everyone I knew. I found the image hilarious, and sad, and perplexing all at the same time. Which I suppose is how I wanted the writing to be.

I don’t think I’ve been prouder of anything more than that writing. Even my books, or stories published in ‘real’ places. I remember reading back over the first year’s writing, chuffed at having ‘completed the task’ - and I could starkly see the evolution of the writing, from insecure and chummy to less affected and floral. I was learning the art of writing, simply by doing it. This is something I’ve never managed to achieve in my ‘real’ writing. Why, I wonder. Fear? Perfectionism? I think the latter is a huge part of it. On the Bunny, to be odd and imperfect was the point. Even if I would often panic before hitting ‘publish’, and spend most the next day frantically editing, the idea was to be human, immediate and real. I could swear and say inappropriate things without fear of offending an editor or broad public. Those who read me were there for the wrongness and the stupidity. It was fun. It felt creative.

But I was embarrassed about it. One friend in particular, a writer I respected, one day either purposefully or not, said, like a knife, that blogs were for ‘narcissists and writers who couldn’t get published’. It wounded me, because not only did I find it such a powerful and robust training tool, I loved what I had written. It was the kind of stuff I should keep to myself, or in a journal, or in ‘morning pages’, but the trouble I’d always had was that was the writing I loved - and wanted to read - that shameful, murky stuff that should be ‘burned’ or refined, that had no place being out there, just yet, the stuff you’re supposed to be ashamed of. I wanted to publish that, but here I was being told exactly what I feared. This writing was ‘lesser’ somehow, just as I had thought.

There I was, the bunny, staring at myself in the mirror, stuffed.

When the year was up, I let the ‘post a day’ thing relax. I kept writing odd pieces, and publishing them, but found I would agonise over them in a way I’d never done when I was writing every day. Often ‘reverting to draft’. I have a tome, now, of unpublished blog posts. I used the space as a journal for some time. Once, I reverted the entire thing to ‘draft’. Then republished the whole thing, until the sweaty nightmare of realising all the unedited pieces that were there, full of faux pas and wrongness, made me pull it all down again.

Some of the pieces made it into the books, reworked into chapters. I have tried, many times, to take some of the pieces and turn them into articles, or short stories in themselves, but they always refuse. Reflections, they don’t seem to fit with the real world. They don’t like to drive home a point, or illustrate something particularly relevant, or twist and turn in the way a story should.

I write this now, wondering if this new form right here, might unlock me from this cage of perfection I’ve fallen prey to again. Perhaps over the years I’ve lost trust in my own mind, that just to speak, sometimes is enough, and it doesn’t have to be perfect and it doesn’t have to be everything.

Half an hour a day. A piece, of something, whatever it is.

Wonder what I’ll call it.