The Tail
At which point does attention to detail becomes perfectionism? How can you define a point where something is so perfect to it's original idea that starts being a diminutive quality?
I would say perfectionism lies at the point of obligation and/or lack of acceptance, where you feel the need to make something so photoreal to what you envisioned, that it becomes a chore. You can see my definition and think most people would find this a bad thing (at least I expect so), but I think it works as a chore analogy since there are times where people really do enjoy seeking this perfection, same as people who like washing dishes or cleaning up in general, and at the same time there are people who just get obsessed with getting everything squeaky clean.
I tend to call this healthy perfectionism detailism, as it isn't driven by a mindless search for control, just driven by loving the process of looking out for details, what differences it the most from perfectionism for me is the presence of acceptance in the process, knowing what you can and cannot do, so that you can achieve your own "perfection".
I honestly sway between those two depending on how well I am mentally, how much time I have, for what purpose am I doing the thing I'm doing. I am a person with a lot of love for methods/techniques/🤓☝️s of things, so it's only fair that when I get involved on something, I try to enjoy/create the methods used to the fullest, although very fun, this is a very VERY risky trap for anything I do, as it can very easily go to perfectionist territory.
Now, as of writing this blog It's been roughly 4-5 months of me not doing art/music almost everyday in like, all of the time I've been doing music (?), and also, it has been 2-3 months of me changing from ableton which I use since 2019 to bitwig, AND also around 3 months since I started an internship on a big factory, so a lot of my views/methods/workflows have been changing, some not as much, some drastically, and Although I can not ever say that I will get rid of perfectionism, I can say that all of this teached me a lot about how to deal with it.
Although it was known to me, over-controlling something only leads to more doubt about the process if you're not careful enough or doesn't know where to stop, thankfully I don't have as many song projects as I thought where this happens, at the same time sadly most of them are projects I care way too much about, so even now it's hard for me to continue them. Sometimes I feel like just winging it and what goes goes, but for some reason I can't do that all for these ones, even though it works just fine for most other projects of mine.
Having said that, now that I have atleast some of this wisdom of dealing with perfectionism, I Don't have the time to actually go through and release music (🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️ so we are in the same place we were since ever fr 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️). Nothing ever happens feijoada