The Paragraph I Promised

Passing Through Season 4, Episode 2

Dear friends,

I’m calling this Thursday series, where I air out chunks of my manuscript and the upcoming season of Passing Through The Podcast, “The Paragraph I Promised.” Having another set of eyes on a paragraph or two, or three, feel less like having nudes leaked and more like unhooking a bra fashioned from streel after a long day of labor.

The drafts may still be rough, the paragraphs, a work in progress, but it’s a powerful step in the direction of getting more comfortable with the never-ending, magically forgiving process of revision.

"Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and lose sight of the whole. Instead of creatng freely and allowing errors to reveal themselves later as insights, we often get mired in getting the details right.

A painting is never finished. It simply stops at interesting places. A book is never finished. But at a certain point you stop writing it and go on to the next thing. That is a normal part of creativity—letting go. We always do the best that we can by the light we have to see by.

Question: What would I do if I didn’t have to do it perfectly?
Answer: A great deal more than I am.”
— Julia Cameron

This series will be a weekly ting for Paid Babes, bi-weekly for the Free Babes.
Thank you, always, for taking the time to read.

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Excerpt from Passing Through Season 4, Ep 2:

There’s another unspoken hierarchy amongst women at weddings that might as well be branded in blood on our foreheads:

• single (but obviously still accomplished and happy!)

• plus one (on the way to being a girlfriend…)

• girlfriend (on the way to being a fiancé!)

• fiancé (but when’s the wedding?)

• wife (but for how long and when are you making it official-official by having children…plural?)

Your title, regardless of the health of your relationship with self or significant other, places you on the makeshift totem pole of maturity and progression propagated by patriarchy, previous generations, and corny (albeit sometimes wildly enjoyable) unrealistic romcoms. 

In this case, Cortney and I were recently engaged, making me a “fiancé,” and we were set to have our first of four wedding ceremonies in my father’s village just days after leaving this one. Moving a metamorphic two rungs up the totem pole, because of an engagement ring, did little to nothing for my ego. Maybe because I’d been a girlfriend amongst a pack of cliquey wives for the majority of Cortney and I’s relationship. My “lower” rank was made painstakingly clear by the pack of wives’ subtle and sometimes theatrically obnoxious reminders. Reminders that, if there was any understanding of who I was and why, they would’ve known were more annoying than they were insulting.

My first encounter with the wives was at one of their birthday dinners on a crisp evening in autumn.