Being a dyspraxic perfectionist

Lately I have been feeling my lack of fine motor skills, and realising I might really find some tasks harder than other people.

[image description: a light purple & pink bell shaped flower, out of focus in the foreground, with bright green grass & stems tangling around a green wire fence. In the background water is visible]

Today I built a mini structure for my tomato plants on the balcony. I got some canes and when I started putting them up, I realised they needed something to hold them straight. I started by wrapping some twine around between the canes and tying them to a drainpipe, but quickly realised this wasn’t helping. Also of course the twine was pink plastic and not green or jute like most people have so it really started to look chaotic. I had some little twigs I’d saved and I started making a triangle frame between 3 canes, once at the bottom and once at the top. It was a process of discovery, how to make them tie together, and how to make it stand solid. In the end, I didn’t want to leave all the ends of the twine trailing, I realised wanted it to look neat. Its hard for me to just walk away and leave a task ‘done enough’ - once I start I’m there zoomed in to the tiny threads for hours.

I realised how much I enjoy doing stuff like that for gardening because no one is watching me! I have this underlying fear that someone is going to laugh at what I’ve done, and see how chaotic the inside of my brain really is. it made me reflect on art making, and how my perfectionism really might be a way of covering up, of coping and then over-doing it. How can I get to a place where I can put in a reasonable amount of effort, for instance for a scratch performance or a visual proposal, and not stay up all night trying to make it look ‘decent’ before its finished?

It also made me think about structure. About putting structure in place as a loving act, how creating structure can help something grow (like the tomato plants). I wonder how much energy they were putting into holding themselves up *and* trying to grow fruit? I hope that giving them these canes to rest on means they can finish making fruit before the end of the summer (even if its only one :). I want to do that for my practice.

Footnote Sept 2021: they did grow fruit! only small, some red & some yellow.