You may have noticed a couple of clangers in the final Lithium comic, hopefully they didn’t get in the way of your enjoyment of it. And as someone commented; “What happened to you? There were never such serious mistakes in the last 54 comics.”
Well … it’s a good question. What did happen to me? I’ll tell you. I went through some really good, hurty, life-changing stuff, and I no longer give quite so much of a shit about my mistakes – particularly if they don’t hurt anyone else! Hooray! I could re-release Lithium #14 with the errors corrected, but … I’m not going to! Yay!
If you look at the rest of my comics, you’ll find mistakes everywhere …
… no matter the extreme levels of my attempted perfectionism …
… little errors just keep creeping in …
Historically, the problem for me was that when we handle our own mistakes, we grapple with our own perfectionism – we really address our sense of self-worth.
- If I get everything right, I will be enough / worthy of love
- Ergo, if I get one tiny thing wrong, I will not be enough / worthy of love
- Gotta hide every mistake.
… that is the issue with perfectionism; it’s really about self worth.
Why does everything have to be perfect? Sure, we should try our best at things, but in my 20s I was definitely more concerned with this than I am now. So what has changed? If you’ve read my comics, you’ll have a good idea – I’ve obviously been on a bit of a journey, delved into my shame, my family issues, delved deep into self harm and self worth. Here’s a clear blog post about that journey, if you’re interested in the topic. And another one. And another one. And another one … yeah, I’ve put some thought into it over the years hehe.
And on this journey, just as Odysseus found, we learn peace within ourselves, with all our crap. With our warts and all. Weird, odd little organic creatures, trying and failing to be perfect. And still worthy of the gift of love, it just takes a bit of a journey to really accept that gift.
And with the errors in Lithium #14, I could re-release it and try and cover all my tracks, but … nah. It’s more important to come to terms with them. Let’s have a quick flick-through of some random comics in the STFW universe … see if it’s just me …
… yeah. There’s tons. Distributed about the internet and translated into umpteen different languages for **literally millions** of people to read and enjoy. Do the mistakes matter? Not really.
And if a carefully-made body of work distributed to ACTUAL MILLIONS of people can calmly contain mistakes and STILL be f*cking excellent … perhaps so can we.
