Hi friends — tomorrow is sticker day! We’re dropping over 30 designs, each in limited quantities. About a third are brand new, and the others are favorites that are new to the shop this year. Patrons get access at 8am PT and the remaining stock will open to everyone at 10am PT.
New Art: Perfectionism
Perfectionism is like a small archway that tells you: you must walk through here. We don't have to take it apart, chew it into small pieces, and scatter them in the desert. It is most easily defeated by simply walking around it.
Perfectionism is the feeling that things must be perfect to be good, and that they must be good to be safe. Like most rigid beliefs about what we must do to be safe, it's a kind of trauma learning. Our bodies feel that there is a lot at stake: messing something up, wasting our lives or our art supplies, failing, turning out to appear untalented or not-special, thinking we've done a good job just to find out others think we haven't, pouring our heart out and still not being understood or appreciated: these can feel so profoundly unsafe that our body either vetoes our plan to create and shuts us down (can't begin something) or hounds us to keep working on something eternally because it's never good enough (can't complete something).
It's a powerful, self-loving, self-protective part of us that has truly done a lot to keep us safe. It was a particularly savvy and helpful strategy in childhood, keeping us on the good sides of the caregivers, peers and institutions we were completely dependent on for survival. It's a gorgeous, heavy shield that takes two hands to hold, making it really hard to paint.
— An excerpt from “Perfection,” the August monthly art guide up on Easy Does It, our open creative community. Read more here and join us!
oh I love the 'most things are good' one so much. so true and such an important reminder <3 also love the perfect circles, it feel like they would also work w affirmations in them like stickers for children at school (but also adults need them too!)