Process > Perfection
Perfection will never let you be human. Process encourages it.
“I fucking hate process. Can’t we just get to the final product? The end result?”
I laughed out loud reading this line in an old journal of mine the other day.
The context: I was talking about my relationships and the realization that all relationships are process. There isn’t really a place or destination wherein you arrive and stay statically happy ever after. We’re always changing and evolving with each other and responding to the world around us.
Needless to say, this realization kinda pissed me off back in 2021.
When I returned to Substack after years of pauses and pivots, my notes were full of people making zines.1
I don’t know why the algorithm chose to put them onto my feed. Divine intervention, perhaps.
I became intrigued. Could I make a zine?
I’m no visual artist, but I am a Virgo, so I set out to research zines: Where did they come from? How does one make and print them? What are the rules?
I already knew about their revolutionary and subversive history in circulating information by and for the people. Art and ideas untouched by white supremacist corporate media agendas? Delicious.
As for the parameters for making a zine, well, there really aren’t any official rules, except that it has to be self-published (again, no corporate greed allowed.)
This further intrigued and intimidated me.
After hesitating as if waiting for the Zine Gods to grant me permission, I said fuck it and gave myself the permission to make one.2
Then I made another. And another.
Maybe it’s their inherent anti-establishment nature or lack of rigid rules, but creating zines is making me fall in love with process.
2021 Ayu would be so confused. Girl… wtf? I thought we hated her!
While I do care about the aesthetics of it all, I don’t feel pressure to create a polished, perfect thing, because zines are inherently not polished nor perfect. In fact, that’s sort of antithetical to their entire philosophical underpinning.
Because of that, I’ve noticed this vast spaciousness open up before me that is devoid of judgment, waffling, or doubting myself. I just get to create. And when I don’t like how something turns out, I scrap it and try again. No taking it as a personal attack or projecting my own worth as a creative on the fact that it looks like shit. It’s just casual, easy-breezy zine girl.
(Unsurprisingly, the creativity is wont to flow more easily without the pressure and incessant internal nit-picking.)
But the best part? I don’t even care what other people think about the final product because I know I worked hard on it, and I’m proud of it. Groundbreaking.
Making zines is teaching me that I can actually love process when I abandon perfection.
Perfection puts all the value on the final product: It’s the big finale, the climax, the flourish and applause.
The finished painting. The finished manuscript. Getting married. Landing that job. Having a baby.
Perfection tells us that being in process isn’t good enough because you’re not ^there^ yet.
But process is the magic, the tension, the heat.
It’s how we learn, make mistakes, get frustrated, get good at something. It’s where we discover the depths of our resolve, persistence, and passion.
When we orient around process instead of perfection, there’s time and space to grow, hone, and explore what’s present. If you’re not comparing your current state of things to an imagined final product or end goal, “not good enough” ceases to exist.
This can be applied to anything, not just zines or writing. I’ve found this ethos slowly trickling into the rest of my life—my relationships, my business, my tarot + astrology practices, cooking, running.
This is not to say that we can’t be proud of our accomplishments. Of course not!
It’s about re-orienting around process instead of an end goal or an end product, like perfection wants us to.
The “final product” can be a rest stop for enjoying and being proud of the things we make and work hard for. But it should not sit at the top of a hierarchy, with process toiling away beneath its gilded gleam.
Taking the goal off of its pedestal and placing it on equal footing with the process of getting there has been the single most impactful way for me to heal from years of perfectionism.
Because process provides the spaciousness for me to be human.
Perfection could never.
I published my first digital zine here if you wanna check it out :)