Failing The Quest For Perfection

This is going to sound absolutely ridiculous.  Mostly because it really is ridiculous.  But I’m going to tell you anyway because I am often on the borderlines of crazy and sharing that makes this space feel real to me.  Plus I need to just work it out my system or I’m afraid that I will actually cross that border all the way into crazy and I’m not sure I’m ready for that yet.

And let’s be real, my family isn’t ready for that either, although I’m sure that they probably think I’m already way over that line.

Anyway, back to ridiculousness.

Last night I finished up the last evening of my photography course.  It’s been 6 weeks of really getting to know my camera and I have learned SO much!  It has been beyond informative and I’m so glad that I did it.  I have used Auto on my camera since I had it (which is for about 6 years already) and it was just time to move to using it for what it is really capable of.  I have this thing where I see the picture in my minds eye but then the Auto function just doesn’t deliver on what I want that picture to look like.  This course was to fix that.

And it really did.  My head was sore every Tuesday night because of all the things I learned and yearned to apply to my daily photography.  But yoh, it was hard work.

Guys, I’m about to start the ridiculous, so before I do I just want you to know that this was a gift from my family and friends for my birthday and it was the only thing I wanted this year.  I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because it really was what I wanted and I learned all the things.  And I loved it!

Right.

So all of this doesn’t explain why I left the course in tears last night.  It so silly, but I could not stop crying.

Because it was our last course, we had to show our homework (we do this every week) and this week it was our first photo story.  You could tell any story you wanted – it could be a literal frame by frame story or a series of pictures that work together.  My story was pretty good – not perfect, but I was relatively happy with it.  Aside from the last picture when Knox was just done and not actually keen to keep on going and so I couldn’t get one where he wasn’t blurry.

Here’s the story…

Cool.  I tried to do everything I’d learned – correct lighting and exposure, motion blur, differing the aperture for depth of field etc.  Everyone had a turn to lay out their story and so when I laid mine out…  I dunno, I was hoping for a bit more of a reaction.  There were comments about how cute Knox was and the lighting.  But I don’t know, I think I was just hoping for more of a crit or if was good enough then a congrats.  It just felt a bit meh.  Ugh, art is so subjective.

Then we had to show our 10 best pictures and this is where I almost lost it.  Like cry in the class lost it.

I hated all the pictures that I could show.  I sound like such a loser but that’s what it is.  I didn’t feel like any of them was strong enough on their own to show what I know and are now capable of doing.  The thing is, I just haven’t been able to put myself to the test because the last couple of weeks have been so manic that I haven’t had a chance to even think, nevermind go out and try and take some cool pictures at a random location.

The two that we decided on aren’t bad, but I just don’t feel like they are worth showing.  I’m not sure that I want to put my name behind it.

So I came home and sobbed.  At first, because I didn’t want to talk about it, Seth thought he’d done something.  But trying to explain this in words just made me feel even more stupid for being upset about it.  It’s so silly.  And yet, I still can’t shake it.

Then the more I think about it, the more I realise that I do this in SO many facets of my life.  Most especially social media.  If the picture isn’t perfect, it will not a damn be on Instagram.  It doesn’t help that when I fight this ridiculousness and actually post it, the picture only gets like 12 likes.  Which shouldn’t mean anything to me but despite trying to get over it, still does.  So much so that I nearly always feel like deleting it.  Even a good face slap doesn’t whip me out of it.  Which affects another part of my life.  You guys.  Because for people that tend to only look at my social and not bother to read these posts, they falsely assume that my life is “perfect”.  I have had that said to me on too many occasions recently and I hate it.  Because it’s just not true.  And because it makes people feel junk about themselves and I hate that.  Which sucks and I don’t know how to fix it.

And I then I’m just feeling like I’m failing at everything.  Like I let down the fundraising team at our school.  That I’m not doing enough at work despite trying to squeeze in extra hours whenever I get behind my screen.  And the kids home work.  And parenting and ugh.  Fails all around.

But I know that maybe half of this is due to the hecticness of the last few weeks and I’m obviously just feeling stressed and emotional.  But man, I hope it wears off soon because it sucks.