Piece By Piece

I always do things in extreme.

And I'm always disappointed.

I'll decide to eat healthy, but just one taste of a forbidden cookie will have me throwing out the entire effort and raiding the kitchen.

When I went back to college, I spent the first several years staying in a class only if I believed I was going to get an A.  If I thought I was going to get a B, I would drop the class.

My belief in myself has been "live your life perfectly or go back in your hole and hide."

Which is why, in the past year of having this blog I am either running gung ho or I appear to have dropped off the face of the earth.

But I'm trying to look at life in a different way.

Maybe it is not about perfection.

Ok, so I already know you cannot live your life aiming for perfection.

Let me reword this.

Maybe it's not about putting your life in a microwave, pressing the button, and expecting it to be done perfectly, in a flash.

Maybe we could look at living life as if creating a quilt?

You design and cut and arrange and rearrange and put together piece by piece, stitch by stitch. And if it doesn't come out the way you want you can always pull out a few stitches and piece it back together again.

Up until the past two years, I lived my life saying everything I thought I was supposed to say, doing everything I thought I was supposed to do, thinking this was the way I was supposed to live my life until I no longer had any idea what it was to live life as me.

The past two years I have been trying to "be me" but that's a hard thing to do when your goal is perfection or nothing at all.

It seems like every week, no, every day, I have to try again.  Arrange, rearrange, piece together, then maybe rearrange again.

But you know what?

I have decided that's ok.  I have decided that from now on I will try to look at life as if piecing together a quilt.  And if it is a crazy quilt, so be it.  

And if I forget about looking at life this way and I find myself once again aiming for perfection, and once again being disappointed, and once again wanting to hide, I will pick up that quilt, pull out some stitches, arrange, rearrange, and piece it back together again.

Sigh.

Who would have thought imperfection would be more hard than perfection?

Who would have thought balance would be more hard than extreme?

But life can be more colorful because of it.

And as an artist, color is good.

'Til later,

Carol B.