Fucking up your cross stitch projects.

I fuck up my cross stitch projects all the time. I’m not proud of it, but I will definitely admit that it’s the case. Why am I so reluctant to embrace my extreme fucking-up-things skills?

I blame Martha Stewart, Rachael Ray, and anyone else who espouses the modern female aesthetic of “having it all, 100% of the time!” It’s not enough that modern women are supposed to be ultimate domestic goddesses, keeping their houses clean and pleasant for everyone all the time; ninjas in the kitchen, cooking meals that are healthy, delicious, nutritious, and pretty to look at; ambitious career women, who just can’t wait to climb right up the corporate ladder; and complete whores in bed, who are ready to Please Their Man in any way possible. Not only do we need to DO all these things, but we also need to be REALLY FUCKING GOOD at them!

You know what I say to that? Fuck that shit.

I’d rather spend my free time doing cross stitch than cleaning my bathroom until you can eat a meal off the toilet seat. I’d rather do almost anything else than the dishes, to Spencer’s eternal chagrin. (“Do you leave these all week so I can do them on the weekends?” he asks. Yes. Yes I do.) And dinner is inevitably a haphazard affair, cobbled together from leftovers and the occasional brain-dead-easy toss-stuff-in-a-bowl salad.

Hell, I set an alarm in the morning, and still I never manage to get to work completely on time.

Being perfect is exhausting, and demoralizing. What happens when you’ve built your life on perfection and you inevitably fuck something up, because you’re human? It can cause a serious crisis.

The same thing happens when I’m working on a cross stitch project. I try to count as best I can, but sometimes, I fuck up. Never has this been more apparent than when I started my big-ass project (the one I referenced in the earlier post). I fucked up an entire section by miscounting by one stitch.

What did I do about it, you ask? Well, I cried, because I’m like that; and then I resolved to do better in the future. That’s about all you can do. And now that the project’s farther along, you can’t even tell that something went wrong.

Don’t beat yourself up when you fuck something up, whether it’s cross stitch or life. Insisting on perfection, whether it’s from yourself, your hobbies, your significant other, or your kids, is only going to leave you neurotic and disappointed. Flaws are what make us human, and as long as we learn from our mistakes, we change and grow as people.