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Everyone can make cool shit.
The fucking Victoria & Albert museum has shoeboxes full of zines people made in a week on a busted typewriter and a stolen photocopier to throw at people in their school or their music scene, and half of them would probably be mortified that one of the 100 copies they made of their diary entries cut and pasted over comics about their ex got scanned and uploaded onto the internet archive and is being taught by strangers to stranger strangers. They’re raw, cheap, too personal and riddled with errors - and it fucking rules.
Then there’s all that perfect shit, the typo-free glossy art and writing that you immediately know is going to be in universities, even down to the fact that the font they used looks more expensive than the same font thrown on your docs.
The messy scraps of people's creativity is cool shit and the pristine masterpieces are cool shit. Everyone can make cool shit.
But you can’t make cool shit.
Not now. You can have made cool shit in the past - the stuff you hold yourself to now, which felt flawed in the moment but gets rosier the further you get from it, that you wish you could manage today - and you could make cool shit in the future - some unknown version of you, somehow free from everyday life and the little problems that keep you stuck, who unlocks some secret potential that’s felt like it’s eluded you in the moment for your whole life, yet somehow you can spot in yourself looking back and are convinced you’ll have eventually - but you can’t do it today.
Cool shit is made by you yesterday or tomorrow, and other people whenever they do anything.
It’s not cool to make cool shit.
Making anything means taking a potentially perfect idea from the idyll of your mind and forcing it to exist in imperfect actuality. It’s the opposite of the lie we tell kids when their dog dies. Your creative project was off on the farm, running around with its booker prizes and pulitzers and oscars and being photographed poking out of your favourite celebrity’s luggage, then we took it out back and forced it to limp around, smelling damp with its mangy fur and wrong number of teeth.
Then your reward for the one thing worse than killing your darlings - making them live - is that you become incredibly vulnerable, having to admit you care about something enough to take an action.
Loads of actions actually - wrestling with making it extant, figuring out what imperfections you’ll have to leave because otherwise it’ll end up abandoned and never even get to be uncool shit and what imperfections you’ll have to fix else you’d rather tear your eyes out than let anyone see it in this state, finish it even after the fun parts are done and the momentum’s left you.
Then it’s done and god forbid, you actually have to show someone. And you’ll agonise on how to do it but it’ll all boil down to staying “Hi, I’m just some person but I made some art about it. I guess I think I’m that fucking special. Please look at it because this matters to me.” Fuck. Can you imagine? And then people look at it! Never the right number, either. Either it’s so few that it feels like it doesn’t matter or it’s way too many and it feels like it matters far too much.
It’s not cool to make cool shit and you’ll have always made it as yourself, never the perfect version you’ll be in the future or the charmingly imperfect person you were in the past who felt all the same weird stuff about themselves but you can look back on with kindness you didn’t have then. No, now you’re just as fucked as you were then but older, should know better, are more tired, and you haven’t had a chance to forgive yourself for whatever you’ve got going on now yet. You can only make shit.
So your only option is to not make anything, or make shit anyway.
You’re everyone else’s someone else, so to all the people you aren’t, your shit will be cool shit. You’ll either be their friend whose work you love and hype up to everyone who’ll listen, or their stranger who’s cool shit they either torture themselves comparing their incomplete shit to, or gets them so motivated they want to make their own shit.
Putting everyone else’s shit aside, you’re your past self’s future self and your future self’s past self. Your current shit is the shit they were looking at when they were judging their shit.
Your shit will become cool shit.
Right now, you’re too close to it. So it feels like it’s just shit. But you’ve done cool shit in the past, and you’ll do cool shit in the future. You’ll make cool shit again.
The next thing you make will be cool shit one day. Even in the worst case scenario where you end up hating it, you made something. Someone who sees it will love it more than you do and more than you expected they would/could. You practiced taking action and got yourself a step closer to the next cool shit you make by doing this shit. And more than anything, inaction is an action, and there’s nothing worse than never doing your ideas. They’re not even shit. The only way to 100% guarantee they won’t be anything good to come of something you make is to not make it.
So we make shit anyway.
If you’ve made it this far, I want you to make shit. And I want you to help me make shit.
I’ve not been writing and I’ve not been publishing because I needed to write all that to myself. If you needed to read it too, let’s give each other some momentum and make cool shit together.
Make something. Anything. Start right now. If you’re reading this, you can almost definitely get started right now even though you’ll probably tell yourself you can’t. It doesn’t have to be perfect, because it can’t be perfect. It just has to be. It can be anything from a single poem or sketch to writing up a concept of something you always wanted to do but never did to an entire zine that you think is shit but could end up in the V&A thanks to one cool curator who took a shine to it.
Make something now. You have to finish it this week.
By the end of the week, send it to me. I’ll publish it in a big collection of cool shit.*
(*Only one rule - don’t be an asshole. I’m not going to publish bigoted shit. I’m not putting racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, etc shit on my websites.)
I’ll publish it by the week after, because I’m not allowed to be a perfectionist about this either. It’ll be published online so everyone can see their shit and each other’s shit real easy, and I’ll make a printable PDF zine version of it too, so everyone who wants a physical scrappy zine copy of it to hold in their hands and make its way into a museum can do that, without me having to deal wit>h the printing costs and pricing and shipping that’ll get in the way of immediately doing cool shit and make it less accessible anyway.
Start it now, finish it this week, send it to antidotetoperfectionism@gmail.com
Thanks for reading, I love you, I love this, I love how things are so exciting and so possible once I get out of the way of my own shit.
Now go make cool shit.