Good enough is good enough

 Everyone makes mistakes, and it is a fact of life necessary for learning. The saying "To err is human; to forgive, divine" one often hears even over 300 years after Alexander Pope wrote it. The phrase is one that I am just now starting to reevaluate. Why does an error need forgiveness? I know the saying means to forgive sinners their sins, but our society often equates mistakes as something that creates a wrong. In truth, most people's mistakes come as accidental or as we are learning something new. We strive not to make mistakes, ergo we strive for that divine perfection.

I have struggled with the concept of perfection most of my life. Everything growing up needed to be my best work, and if I got a B, an A was just a bit more work away. I internalized a need not make mistakes as a sign I did my best. This pressure wasn't from parents or a teacher per se. This need to not make mistakes came from society at large. I internalized the idea that to do my best meant making no mistakes. This led to freezing many times and then doing things in a rush making MANY mistakes. Then I inevitably beat myself up for failing to do my best. It never occurred to me that good enough might actually be good enough. 

Recently, I have been stitching on a cross-stitch pattern to put on my website when it launches. I have put in 65 hours of work on the piece. Since the main design is almost complete, I have looked over all my work, and I noticed that I had made a mistake towards the middle by stitching in the wrong direction. An easy mistake to make, and I marked the location out to revisit before I finish and fix it. 

I found myself chastising myself when I saw the same mistake elsewhere in the piece. Here I had made the same mistake twice, and now I have to go back and rip the stitches out to redo them. It constantly comes up in my head as I finish the piece. Even after marking the spots, so as not to forget hasn't removed the naggling voice in my head reminding me of my mistakes. I decided to do this week's blog post on errors since it is on my mind. I took photos of the two sections to include pictures, and that's when I saw it, and I hadn't made the same error twice. That first mistake ended up fine, and I looked at the piece from a weird angle, which made it appear incorrect. That made me stop in my tracks and laugh at myself.

For the past four days, my mind has occupied itself with how the piece needed fixing and annoyed at myself for the error. Even with a tiny area needing restitching, my whole perspective changed, and it changed because I had made a mistake about making a mistake. My mind seemed so ready to criticize me for an error it made one where none existed, and it didn't matter that I found an actual mistake later. I found myself thinking of when good enough is good enough. I will fix the error, but chastising myself does not need to happen. One mistake in 65 hours does not mean I need to kick myself. Heck, even two mistakes in 65 hours is a good record.

Reminding myself that good enough means I am not failing at anything I try. If you meet the basic standard means you reach high enough. Beyond that means it is just frosting. Tastes good but doesn't have any real nutritional value. In 65 hours, one mistake occurred in that piece. It will get fixed, and no one will ever be able to tell its location. How we handle that means whether that mistake turns into a problem. Me chastising myself created a problem. Fixing a simple error and moving on means I have learned. Even though I am a professional embroiderer, I am still learning, and I still make mistakes. That is good enough for me. Please see my mistake and know that I have learned from it.