If You want Perfection Go to Pottery Barn

Today is my birthday. I am old. I’m fine with that. I’m enjoying it, actually. I care much, much less about things that aren’t important, and obviously, cherish the things that are: family, friends, healthy relationships.

Today I got four emails that stood out to me among the junk that has become my yahoo account: One from Word Guru wherein the word of the day is denouement—you know as in the culmination, the finale, the resolution, or as I learned in English lit; the unraveling—and one from a company offering me burial insurance—I’ll burn, thank you very much—and one from my bank letting me know my checking account was overdrawn. Ladies and gentlemen, this is where I’m at.

The fourth email was from my therapist (I’m from California so bear with me) sharing the link to our telehealth appointment. I see her once a month for a tune up. I have for years. She’s become the positive voice in my head that reminds me I’ve always been able to do hard things and starting a pillow cover company isn’t even in the top five of the hard things I’ve done; she’s also the mitigator for my journeys down any number of rabbit holes—these are usually rabbit holes lined with self-doubt and hastily painted in imperfection. I told her that I’d never made anything—specifically a pillow cover or a quilt—that was perfect. That nothing I do can ever be perfect. And she reminded me, as my sewing teacher had last year, that handmade can’t be perfect. That part of the beauty of something made by hand is its imperfection; and that like anything else in life, it isn’t our job to point out the imperfections, but to embrace them. And. If people are looking for perfection, they can go to Pottery Barn.

I love Pottery Barn. My bed is from Pottery Barn. My sheets are from Pottery Barn. They’re perfect. Pottery Barn is perfect. But Pottery Barn doesn’t have the pillows I love. The ones with the sassy green oranges or the tattooed pin up girls; or all the other ones that look like softballs tossed back from the sun that make me happy when I get home from doing a bunch of things that made me perfectly unhappy. And, so there it is; the glaringly perfect imperfection of handmade pillow covers brought to you by an unraveling, overdrawn, grandmother with a real shot at obtaining burial insurance.

Cheers from the bright side.

Tracey