When pictures say more than a thousand words

For almost three years now, I've used the spare bedroom as my office. In the early months, I had a tiny desk crammed in next to the double guest bed, making it an uncomfortable working space and a cramped guest bedroom, neither one adequate for its part-time purpose.

As time went on, I realised that I used the room as an office all year round, and as a guest bedroom on less than ten nights a year. So we sold the bed, got a bigger desk and a bookcase (of course) and I gradually made it a proper office which is occasionally used as a guest bedroom with an inflatable bed that can be packed away again.

Then the velvet covered recording booth was added, a now permanent addition to the room, making it a recording studio as well as an office.

But the walls were left bare. Well, there was a mirror mostly obscured by the recording booth, left over from the guest bedroom days, and a couple of tiny pictures in places that looked odd due to the changed purpose, one squidged up next to the bookcase with an expanse of empty beige wall beside it, for example.

A couple of years ago I found a stash of pictures that I had collected over the previous decade and fell in love with them all over again. I wanted to put them up in my office, but they needed to be framed and spruced up. I dithered over that for a while, and settled on renovating the frames that some had, and buying ones for those without, then spraying them silver so they all looked good together.

It took the best part of a weekend to do. Then I stacked them on a shelf in said office book case and did nothing with them. Until yesterday.

The reason I'd been working, recording and creating in the most drab, miserable and empty room of the house was because I had it in my head that those pictures would need to be arranged very carefully, and put up very precisely, to look perfect on the walls. I've only ever hung one picture in a big space, but to have lots of small pictures on only two walls, well, that would require a real eye for interior design. One I simply don't have.

So they gathered dust on that shelf, even after all that work to frame them, even after my excitement at finding them again, even after I had rolled my eyes at the bare beige walls for years.

For a long time I told myself that I didn't need walls full of interesting, pretty pictures. I write my stories and novels at this desk; all of the glorious technicolour pictures I need are in my head.

Bobbins. That was one part of me protecting myself from having to admit that I was too much of a perfectionist to be brave enough to hang those pictures untidily. And more than that, it was arguing for making my environment so dull it was almost like punishing myself for my design inadequacies.

Enough!

I didn't really think about it when I took the hammer and picture hooks up the stairs yesterday afternoon. I didn't steal myself for impending interior design failure, I didn't give myself some kind of epic pep talk. I just got all those pictures out, started with the first that caught my eye and decided that should be at eye level when I type. The rest were just arranged around that.

My walls are now full of those beautiful pictures. But more than that, I felt so light when I stood back and saw them all in their higgedly-piggedly glory. I looked at the uneven spacing and laughed, delighting in the freedom of imperfection. I felt proud to be so hopeless at hanging groups of pictures, yet able to put them up, finally claim this space fully as my creative haven, and let myself be nourished by them.

Yesterday was a small victory against the tyranny of perfectionism.

And it is a tyrannical rule. I can tie myself in such knots, make myself sick with self-berating hatred when I make a mistake. I feared, for all those years, that if I put those pictures up, I'd never enjoy them, I would only be fixated on the way they don't line up. I would only see my poor picture-hanging skills instead of a fantastical castle, a mysterious bridge, an old Cornish tin mine on a granite cliff, and all the other images that speak to me so.

Sometimes pictures say more than a thousand words. These are showing me that sometimes, making mistakes, being decidedly and consciously imperfect is not only forgivable, but actually a joyful thing.