I was hanging out with my ten year old nephew this past week and something went down between us that will stay with me.

He got a make your own comic book set for Christmas and he wanted me to help him. He seemed kinda concerned at the beginning - concerned about getting the front page right. He criticised something he drew. Wanted me to draw stuff for him. Had one (brilliant) idea and then threw that in the bin because he didn’t believe he could do it.

I suggested that he not worry too much about having the whole thing worked out and just play around with some ideas, draw up a few characters and practice, because there was loads of space in the book he had.

I said, in passing: It doesn’t have to be perfect.

And what happened after was fucking wild honestly. Like a stuck tap just got turned on.

He’d drawn a new character within minutes. And I knew it was that sentence because he repeated it back to me several times while excitedly bouncing his ideas off of me:

It doesn’t have to be perfect.

I know from having been a kid once, how deeply words are internalised. Words that the speaker might have forgotten about within seconds of saying them.

But that really cemented it for me. The way he took that in was so instant and powerful.

And it’ll stay with me because I was dominantly raised by a pair of perfectionists - who I love deeply and have gorgeous relationships with now - but as a kid I did not feel like I had permission to make mistakes or get it wrong and it left a pretty enormous gash on my nervous system that I’m still working out to this day.

If there is one thing I wanna teach my kid(s) when I have them, it’s that there is an endless amount of grace available to them for their mistakes.

Because that’s how you learn from them and not repeat the same mistake over and over and over again for years and years on end; you give yourself grace. And that grace is the light that illuminates the lesson.

#nostr #primal #perfectionism #pleb #plebchain #grownostr #pleblife