Permission to Make Bad Art
A Recovering Perfectionist's Path to Creating Joy
When I was younger, in my early 20s maybe, I played guitar a fair bit, listened to a fair spread of tunes. (My Thumbprint station on Pandora is wild.) At that time in life, I also loved guitar tabs for learning. Ultimate-guitar.com became a favorite website. I must have printed half a ream of tablature (RIP trees) for scrutiny and practice. I could not, however, locate tabs for Tweaker’s song, “Happy Child.”
Bugged me, to fail to learn the track simply because my preferred learning platform failed to churn out a done-for-me result. So, I did what I always do in these situations: I made the damn tabs myself.
Spent hours listening to “Happy Child” on repeat, tested my instincts, crafted tablature for the entire song by ear and hand, scrapped it, started over, scrapped again, finally had something. And, as I’d come to learn, I did well, given the circumstances.
I was never going to be one of the guitar greats, lemme tell ya. Never had the spunk for it. Still, I was satisfied with my homegrown tabs, confident that they were at least 80 percent correct (Pareto’s principle in action), and finally saw an opportunity to give back to the ultimate-guitar community that had given me so much.
For whatever reason, when I was thinking about learning the drums recently, I caught a wisp of the old tab memory, searched them out, and was pleasantly surprised.
Were my tabs perfect? Fuck no. Someone corrected the chorus in the comments, chords I suspected weren’t quite right when figuring them out by ear, though I wasn’t skilled enough a player to find the right chords. Even so, my imperfect tabs received more than 1,000 views and were favorited to 9 lists.
Pretty fuggin cool.
I’m no guitar player, and this isn’t some wild monologue about how I’m diving back into the strings and going whole-hog on becoming a rockstar or anything. Far from it. I’ve exactly zero business giving lessons or how-tos, don’t play often enough to provide a few how-Is. But even I, unskilled guitarist ranked somewhere in the 134k on U-G.com, provided a launch pad for a bunch of people — at least those 9 who favorited the tabs — to learn a song I loved, a song I wanted to learn for the sheer joy of playing along with a burned CD while my neighbors tried not to listen from the other side of our paper-thin apartment walls.
Music and the Arts Show You What Joy Is Made Of
Like many humans, I felt pulled to music my whole life. Somewhere, there exists a photo of me at age four clutching a favored brown plastic cassette player, hunched in the dark corner of the hallway, happily listening to (and then fast-forwarding to find again) Great White’s “Once Bitten, Twice Shy.” While my process of playing a song on repeat until I knew it inside and out started there in that hallway, Great White wasn’t the only act in my life.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve listened to lots of 80s glam and rock and roll, the tunes my parents listened to. Grew up on a steady diet of Aldo Nova (Blood On the Bricks still slaps, btw), Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Cinderella, Def Leppard, Eagles, Firehouse, gah! I could have spent days on end skating around the kitchen floor in stocking feet and clutching a wooden-spoon microphone. While I loved rock and roll then, still do, the music I listened to was always held an arm’s length from me. Creating music was something other people did.
That changed when I saw Hanson on television.
Zac Hanson was my first drum love. Seeing his face in the “MMMBop” video made me believe that I, too, could do cool shit when I was a kid. He was only about a year older than me when their debut track hit number 1 on the Billboard charts. I was in love, instant crush. And if I wasn’t already, that day I became a dreamer.
When I eventually got a copy of Hanson’s Middle of Nowhere and started blasting tunes and using air instruments, I surrounded myself with pillows and beat away at those drums, had a great time doing it. Sometimes pretended I was drumming with Hanson (sometimes got my brother to pretend, too). But when my cousins and I were starting a band — complicated without instruments or any musical ability of any kind — I chose, or otherwise ended up with, the guitar. Always drums in my fantasies but guitar in real life?
Maybe the answer, for me, wasn’t one or the other.
Comparison Judgment Will Steal Your Joy
All those years ago and I still remember my limiting beliefs, how nervous I was to share those tabs because I knew they weren’t perfect. Perhaps I shouldn’t have shared them at all. The notion certainly went through my head that I was a ghastly guitar player who should never peddle my suckage. Part of me thinks that if even one other person had written tabs for “Happy Child,” I probably wouldn’t have shared mine because I’d have been afraid of comparison judgment. But since no tab existed against which to compare or judge mine, I went ahead, did the thing, plodded ahead thinking that maybe one other person wanted to learn “Happy Child,” too.
I’m glad I had the wherewithal to do so, and in some ways, I’ve been a little more free with my art than with other aspects of my life.
My paintings aren’t perfect:
Nor is my craft book on Point of View (which currently allows you to name your fair price, hint hint). The bottom of my copyright page even includes the following message:
The author would like you to know any errors remaining in this booklet are a result of her chaotic choices. At home, she’s known as “Messy Mommy.” It is what it is.
Really, nothing I produce is perfect, and it shouldn’t be. Perfection is not only unattainable and unrelatable, it’s nonexistent.
I learned a long time ago when to release a piece of art into the world, even with its imperfections, because imperfections are human.
They’re the marks of the creator.
So, Shrug Off Perfectionism . . .
If you’re a millennial or close to it, you probably grew up people-pleasing, hard. Many of us were raised to respect our elders, not put our elbows on the table, never talk back, use our manners, and to do as the adults said, rather than learning from what they did. Many of us also heard, “Don’t you want people to like you?” as if people liking us is a net good for personal satisfaction. (Spoiler alert: It’s not.)
It’s gross, the way we were socially coerced into hiding our imperfections, even those of us fortunate enough to have wonderfully supportive and loving parents. Still, much of my childhood was spent trying like hell to please everyone all the time. Meanwhile, I was failing to create contentment or happiness for myself.
Around the time I posted the tabs to “Happy Child,” I was spiraling. Started smoking cigarettes. Was drinking often, and a lot. Made some choices that may make my father blush to hear about today. Still, I constantly worried that I wasn’t good enough at basically anything I ever did. Even then, I was a neurotic artist.
It’s interesting, the way hindsight can provide the why to previously unanswerable questions. When I was learning music all those years ago, I thought I ought to play guitar, though I was actually interested in drums (I’d have never told anyone that though, too embarrassed for no reason at all).
It felt important to me, so important I buried the desire because I’d have been mortified if someone had suggested I couldn’t or shouldn’t play drums. I simply couldn’t bear rejection when it came to percussion. Instead, I openly failed, in some ways, at guitar.
While I never played publicly and had horrid guitar-playing stage fright — so clumsy; guitar never came naturally to me like the alto sax once had — I was more willing for people to know I was not good at guitar than for them to discover I was shit at drums.
. . . and Embrace the Suck
All these memories, all this reminiscing, all this checking in on tunes I know and love, and what I really had been thinking about was playing drums, how I want to move our electric drum kit to a more comfortable spot in the basement (the septic-ejector pump doesn’t exactly inspire) and really crash into learning.
Maybe I should have done this a long time ago.
Years later, I can offer little explanation for Past Fal, except it was likely the fear of a chronically scared kid that held me back. It’s curious, but it’s now so far removed I can no longer relay exactly what I would have been thinking. But since I’m now in the give-no fucks! phase of my life, I’m ready to invest the time and suckage to learn how to play drums.
I’ve already started.
Will I learn drums publicly? I mean, I’m not going to start a Youtube channel or anything; I don’t have the patience or wherewithal for that kind of nonsense. But maybe I can eventually learn the drum part for another track, a new “Happy Child” to pass on to a new set of learners. I already have a few songs in mind, and my partner has promised to help me make room for my own musical pursuits in a more comfortable location, a location we’ve already selected. And maybe I’ll share a progress update or two here.
Sometimes artists worry that their processes don’t matter unless they’ve produced a body of work — at least one great piece! — but they do matter.
If you’re doing it now, whatever “it” is, many others have already done it. But many more are just starting, even thinking about starting.
Sharing your story, your art, even as you’re creating it and developing yourself, may be a reason someone else begins their journey into creative development.
That’s why I shared the letter I wrote to future readers of my novel-in-progress way before I have anything close to a finished or sharable draft of the book.
If you know you need to start sharing your art but haven’t yet, take this nudge as permission to go create your own imperfect “Happy Child” and share it with the world.
Someone may be searching right now for what you’re creating.
♥ Fal
P.S. I realized I no longer have the finesse to play my own “Happy Child” tablature, so I’m going to be diving back in, using those homegrown tabs as a springboard for my own conditioning and I work to get back into my musical self.
P.P.S. If you’re a millennial mom (or vibe like a millennial mom) and you want some insights into how to let go of perfectionism and embrace your brand of suck, let’s chat: https://calendly.com/fallonclark/embrace-the-suck
Until you feel like you’ve got it, I’ve got you.