Series Introduction: Practicing the Art of Being Perfectly Yourself

Journal Entry: December 28, 2025, 8:28 AM

pdp1483ct25 - 20 x 20 inches - acrylic and pencil over paper on canvas - cecil touchon

Series Introduction: Practicing the Art of Being Perfectly Yourself

This series begins with a simple observation that is easy to agree with and difficult to live: nobody is perfect, yet everyone has the capacity to become more fully themselves.

Most discussions of perfection assume an external standard. An ideal to be reached, a version of the self to be achieved, a benchmark set by culture, profession, or comparison. The problem with this framing is not that it asks too much, but that it asks the wrong thing. It quietly replaces authenticity with imitation and development with conformity.

The alternative explored here is not self-improvement in the conventional sense. It is self-alignment.

To learn to be perfectly oneself is not to arrive at a finished state. It is to enter a lifelong process of attunement. A process of listening more carefully, acting with greater coherence, and allowing one’s particular nature to take shape through practice rather than pressure. This is not a philosophy of flawlessness. It is a philosophy of fidelity.

These essays are written primarily from the perspective of a creative life, because creative practice makes this process unusually visible. Artists, writers, musicians, makers, and other creatives repeatedly encounter the same conditions: uncertainty, emptiness, resistance, repetition, doubt, intuition, and return. Over time, these encounters teach lessons that extend well beyond the studio.

The creative process exposes how a person meets the unknown.
How they respond to failure.
How they listen for direction.
How they relate to discipline.
How they negotiate inner and outer authority.

In this sense, a creative life becomes a practical training ground for becoming oneself.

This series does not assume that creativity is limited to professionals, nor that it requires a particular identity. It speaks to anyone who feels called to make, to imagine, to shape meaning, or to live with greater intentionality. The emphasis is not on talent, recognition, or outcome, but on orientation and practice.

Each essay approaches the central question from a different angle: breath, permission, discipline, intuition, craft, simplicity, error, strangeness, and return. Taken together, they form a loose path rather than a system. There is no required order and no final destination promised.

What connects them is a shared refusal of unrealistic ideals and inherited assumptions. Instead of asking how to become better than others, the question becomes: How do I become more truthful to what I am? How do I live in a way that allows my particular capacities, limits, and insights to mature rather than harden?

Perfection, in this framing, is not something added on. It is something revealed as interference is reduced. When attention sharpens, when listening deepens, when the noise of comparison quiets, a person begins to move with greater ease and clarity. The result is not superiority, but coherence.

This series is not instructional in the sense of providing formulas. It is invitational. The ideas offered here are meant to be tried, tested, adapted, or set aside. Their value lies in whether they help the reader notice something true in their own experience.

Nobody is perfect. That is not a failure. It is a condition of being alive and unfinished. The possibility explored here is that learning to be perfectly oneself is not only achievable, but necessary, especially in a time when inherited models of success and identity no longer feel adequate.

These essays are offered as companions along that learning process, written from within it rather than above it.