your perfectionism will not save you.

on the weight of wanting to be the exception.

do you ever hear yourself speak and wonder where you learned to be that cruel?

i had a moment last weekend, working on a draft of my debut novel [what a thrilling sentence to write; what a pain it is to make a reality]. it was a saturday morning, barely. everyone was asleep.

it was one of those early hours in the day when the world is quiet and lonely, and everything seems possible. in the Quran, it says that Allah covers the night in day. i find that image so romantic. the darkness always exists, but God makes it modest and gives the night its privacy, cloaking it like a curtain in light. on that particular morning, it felt like i alone was a witness to that curtain descending. i felt injected with a strange energy and whenever i feel alive, i reach for a pen.

this chapter specifically has been giving me a hard time because of the expectations i’ve placed on it; it is the first time my two lovers meet after a decade apart. it must be laced with yearning yes, but a quiet resentment also. embarrassment at knowing and being known on such an intimate level by someone who is now a stranger. it must be witty and charming and yet stifled in an awkwardness that is hard to ignore. their contexts have changed, their dynamic switched.

it must, in short, be really fucking good.

i sat there, reading the draft i had left behind weeks ago like a stray DM, when suddenly i heard:

how fucking pedestrian ayan. how unremarkable.

i heard it so clearly, i turned around to see if someone else had said those words, but no. it had been me. i shut my laptop and sat in silence until it was time for fajr prayer.

i finished my creative writing masters and graduated at the start of this year. our workshop’s would go as follows:

you’d be given a week to write a piece and submit it to a shared portal for all the other students in your seminar group to read. they were tasked with preparing criticism of your work to share with you in person. on the day, you would sit silent and as your professor went around the room and asked everyone to break down your work and share their experience reading it. you were not allowed to interject or counter their critiques. it doesn’t matter if they’re missing the point; your job is to bear it.

at the end, after everyone has said their piece including your tutor, you are given the floor to address any remarks made, but by then the damage has already been done. you cannot unhear what has been said. there have been students visibly on the brink of tears by the time it was their turn to speak, others who got defensive (understandably) and refused to accept our comments.

one of things i’m proudest of as a student in those classes is that i have never stripped a fellow writer of their pride, ever. people in my seminar cohort would regularly come up to me and tell me they were grateful for my suggestions and felt encouraged by the effort i took to try to understand them and their writing. people would ask if they could send me bits of writing to have a look at, a request i was always humbled by.

even in my work as a critic, i work hard to find things to love about the thing i am reviewing. if my critical opinion is one of dissent, there is a reason for it. i do not reach for cruelty with ease when it comes to my estimation of other people and yet, on that morning, it rushed from my mouth like it had always been waiting to come out.

mistakes have always felt fatal to me. i am not someone who is moved easily but when i am, i become almost compulsive about that thing. i am that way about my work. i don’t care about the fact that i can’t ride a bike (don’t look at me like that, i can feel your judgement all the way from here) or that i’m horrid at maths. i do care about excelling at the things i choose for myself. it’s why i keep starting to paint and then stopping. i must be a master or nothing at all. i’m a writer. who am i if i can’t even do that believably?

who is ayan removed from her capacity to string together sentences and move people?

it’s why creative block feels like a small death. this thing that you are meant to be good at, this gift, has suddenly abandoned you. you do not know how long for. it feels like an indictment of you personally, a punishment. imagine an opera singer who stands on stage one day, opening her mouth to let music come forward being met instead by silence. it would ring clearer to her than any note she’s ever sung. imagine being betrayed by thing you’ve spent years nurturing.

our relationship to our craft is as visceral and real as the ones we have with people. more so sometimes; we spend the most amount of time with ourselves after all and these creative urges are embedded in us. why do we let our own self-doubt poison our love affair with ourselves?

most perfectionists are people with good taste. i grew up on james baldwin and toni morrison. they are the pinnacle to me, my examples. when i read my own work, of course i find it lacking; i have fixated on two exceptions and tried to level with them like they were ordinary. toni morrison did not learn rhythm. it flowed through her like notes from a saxophone, booming and unmissable. so i must stop chasing her and remember that i was born with a rhythm of my own.

i will go over a piece again and again and again and again, combing through it for the slightest hint of a ‘mistake’. my editors love me because they rarely have to lift a finger when they’re dealing with one of my essays, but the cost of that is often a fair chunk of my own sanity.

it’s way i have instated a rule for myself on here: i never edit a piece. no matter how many mistakes magically and conveniently reveal themselves to me after i have unleashed a piece onto the world and hit publish, i’m not allowed to cave. i may shuffle paragraphs around but i do not re-read the piece so many times the words no longer mean anything. it has been hard, but for the most part i have done well to keep my word, giving me a space to share my work honestly, devoid of self-judgement.

i know where my perfectionism comes from. i am a black, muslim migrant woman after all. striving to be a model minority has been baked into me from birth. i wear these things i’ve amassed- my degrees and eloquence and wardrobe- and wield them like weapons. from the day we black girls are born, our mother’s sit us down to tell us the same hard truth their mothers told them:

you will have to work twice as hard to get half as much.

some of us recognized even then the unfairness of that reality. most of us heard it ringing in the back of our heads whenever we’d get passed up for a promotion at work or when you’d be just a single mark away from getting the highest grade in class.

the lie we are told is that if we are good enough, we can out-achieve our marginalization. the model minority myth decrees that the best of us will finally be elevated to the ruling group. black women are the most educated demographic in the US. a recent study found that black female directors get the highest critical review ratings for their work and yet still get the least amount of funding for their second projects. in other words, even their talent can not save their careers. in other words, the onus is not on them.

when the issue is systemic, so is the solution. placing the burden of having to escape the system on us, the victims of it, does nothing to rattle the status quo. we wear ourselves to the bone learning and creating just to be snubbed for oscars. do not punish yourself and strip your process of joy seeking a false equality.

you do not have to be exceptional to be worthy of respect and dignity. you were born deserving of those things.

to be great is a beautiful thing. i find people who are good at their job unbelievably sexy, covered in a sensuality only self-assuredness and disipline can bring forth. why do we leave concerts more enamored with the musicians we love than when we arrived? watching them perform their talent is nothing short of a thrill. there is beauty in wanting to be fluent in your chosen creative language- but perfectionism supersedes that urge. perfectionism is wanting to be unharmable. your comparisons are not your peers but God or whatever other force rules benevolent and unquestionable over this cosmos. it is striving for that which is beyond humanness-after all, we accept that we are wired to be flawed- and abusing yourself in the process.

i interviewed louis partridge (of disclaimer acclaim/ olivia rodrigo’s beans on toast lover) late last year- an actor who is as sweet as he is talented and clear-eyed- and he said something that stuck with me that i wish i could have squeezed into the piece:

believing that you can achieve perfection as an actor feels vain…thinking that you are capable of creating something completely unique and original performance wise just doesn't feel attainable.

the more i thought about it, the more i understood what he meant. there is ego there, in holding onto this belief that you are even capable of creating something perfect and undoubted. you come full circle and realize that even your insecurity reveals a self-obsession.

i don’t know who needs to hear this but you are worthy of respect even if you are mediocre. your writing will find a home, no matter how you feel about the sentence structure. your thoughts are important, even if they come out ineloquent. not every piece you create will be life altering; every artist, no matter how brilliant, has a skip in the discography, albums we like less than others because they are people.

sure, your perfectionism might make you exceptional but it will certainly always make you miserable. i think you deserve more than that. may you never sit alone in the dark with only your cruelty to keep you company. may you cloak yourself in the same kindness you so readily lavish upon others.

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thank you so much for reading my loves! i hope you have all been well. i’ll be dropping a weekly culture round-up for all you paid subs every saturday so look out for that, and again: thank you to everyone who has upgraded. know that your investment in me and rent free means the world.

i didn’t intend to share another ‘personal’ piece so soon after my last essay but i kept thinking about that moment and thought i’d share it, just in case you needed to hear it to.

until next times loves,

aa xx