When I was a young beginner bass student, I was subjected to the usual motivational methods that tend to be used on high school music students generally. Simply stated, mistakes were shameful things. Every time you made a mistake, this opened you up to criticism. Making mistakes would lower your standing in the pecking order. Making mistakes would make you vulnerable, and there was always someone in the vicinity who was also a victim of this psychological abuse, and would take advantage of your vulnerability and rub salt in your psychic wound. This is all done in the name of “making you better,” but it was a form of psychological torture.
Well, one day I get sick and tired of the snide condescending remarks, and to be fair, this sadistic pedagogical approach sort of worked. I started to practice, with the goal of getting to the point where I would never ever make a mistake ever again, not for any artistic goal, but purely for the purpose of protecting myself from anyone’s hurtful remarks.
Well folks, I will say, I got pretty close, but I never attained perfection. I never got to the point where I was certain to be “error-free.” But I did become free of something else. I was satisfied that I had made myself the best bass player I could possibly make myself, and if that wasn’t good enough for somebody else, well, that was their problem. In sum, I had gotten to the point where I accepted my imperfections.
This transcendent moment was probably one of the biggest benefits of all my “arts education.” I had learned, on one level anyway, to just accept myself for who I was. I had escaped from shame, at least in one dimension.
But for the vast majority of people, I think that self-acceptance is elusive. The easy go-to example is personal appearance, and the use of images of slightly underweight perfect bodies that are presented to us as standards for us to compare ourselves to. The destructive power of such imagery is well documented. But this fear of being caught exposing one’s imperfections manipulates us in other ways; e.g., it makes afraid to voice opinions in public. After all, no political party or candidate is perfect, and if you voiced support of this or that political entity, you are automatically opening yourself up to being told of their imperfections. This high school music class utopian standard of “no mistakes” should not apply to real life, but our remembrances of being shamed and humiliated at one time of our lives carries on through adulthood, making it so hard to accept our many shortcomings, and overly reacting to anyone else’s, especially if we are looking for some excuse to suppress their political agenda.
When a Greek archer’s arrow falls short of its target, he will say, “I have sinned.” The verb “to sin” means “to fall short of your ideal.” By that definition, yes, we are all sinners, and while it is something to constantly try to improve upon, it is not something to be ashamed of. People who use the possibility of perfection as a standard never meet that standard themselves. They are eager to distract anyone from noticing this, and they do so by aggressively pointing out the imperfections of others. Since they do nothing but criticize, it is impossible to respond to them in kind. They are exploiting everyone else’s natural narcissism. You can’t gain anything by merely pointing out their imperfections, this is all a distraction from the core issue of boundaries and vulnerability. Only by facing and accepting your intrinsic human imperfection can you find the internal emotional balance needed to not be thrown off by this oh so common symptomology, which is really just people trying to manage their own shame and sense of inadequacy by dumping it on someone else and making themselves feel relatively better by making someone else feel relatively worse.
Perfection as a “standard” is a commonly used technique of exploiting vulnerability for personal gain. Any time anyone introduces the idea of “perfection,” be that a perfect score or a perfect body or anything else, it’s a fair bet that they either selling something, or they are setting up an excuse to create shame and disconnection, in order to keep their distance from life, from their painful memories, and their fear of admitting to the vulnerable imperfect reality of themselves.
© Justin Locke
