There are no mistakes in art

Lessons from Pre-K and wanting an A+ in candle-making

Last night, my boyfriend Iba and I went to a candle-making workshop hosted by my friend Eric for his brand Fragile Glass. After a meditative moment where we listened to André 3000 and rooted into our sense of smell, Eric took the floor to teach us a bit about the process before letting us loose to choose our own scent combinations.

The event was held at Cap & Stem, a mushroom gift shop here in DC. If you don't know, DC has a loophole around recreational cannabis and psilocybin—while shops can't sell you these products directly, they can sell you a pep talk or a sticker or, in this case, seeds for your garden, and offer you free "gifts" in exchange.

The space around us was filled with Khruangbin posters and shelves stocked with gardening supplies. Incense, stuck down into the dirt of potted plants, burned slowly as we listened.

In his brief lecture, Eric was clear about one thing: There was no way to do this wrong. He didn't offer us specifics on how to combine different notes or what to avoid when blending scents. He asked us, simply, to "follow our noses."

I looked over at Iba and knew this would be his kryptonite. Right on cue, he raised his hand.

"Are there any mistakes you made early on that you think we should avoid?" he asked.

I smiled at him across the room, knowing the question he was really asking:

"How do I win?"

I went to Pre-K at Good Shepherd in North Fort Myers, Florida. It's a small Lutheran church and school, located on the corner of Orange Grove Boulevard, close enough to my grandparents’ house that my Papaw could ride me there on the back of his bike.

I don't remember a lot about this time in my life. My mom and I moved to Southwest Florida from Jacksonville when I was 4. For a while, I attended "Memaw School," painting palm sheaths with my grandmother during the days while my mom taught or waited tables across town to make ends meet.

Getting by on a single Florida teacher's salary meant that we moved a fair amount, always renting, and as such most of my childhood memories are tied to apartments. There, I think as we drive around now, was the complex where I learned to cast a fishing pole. Here is where the car got stolen and rammed into a billboard down the street. There is where my heart broke for the first time.

Despite my limited memories, there is one phrase from Pre-K that never left me. No matter what we were doing in class or how we were expected to spend our time, my teacher repeated one piece of advice:

"There are no mistakes in art."

I'm not sure how it happened, but this phrase became a guiding principle in my family. Even my Dad, living 10 hours away, took to repeating it often. Maybe my family knew, even then, that they were dealing with a little perfectionist. Maybe they needed the reminder themselves.

Either way, I grew up with the idea that there are no mistakes in art. Even now, it bounces around in my head as a reminder, a code of ethics, when I am writing an essay or preparing a class to teach.

Back at the mushroom shop, Eric gave us the green light to begin. We moved around the table in the center of the room, sniffing an assortment of oils with names like "Smoked Oud" and "Shea Mahogany.”

(He’d asked us not to think too much about the names, but I swear still wanted to love "Library." In the end, it was just too sweet.)

I grabbed the few that stuck out to me, and when I combined them together I realized they, unsurprisingly, smelled like every candle I've ever purchased. They smelled blue.

Something felt off, so I brought my collection to Eric for his opinion.

"It smells very fresh, like clean linen," he agreed.

This wasn't the reaction I was looking for. I wanted the affirmation that I was good at this, that I'd done the right thing, that I'd be getting an A+ at making my candle.

When I asked him for ways to make it more interesting, he asked me questions in return. Did I like it? Was it appealing to me? Did it remind me of anything, evoke some scent memory?

I am, generally, not a very competitive person. This is only due to the fact that I rarely put myself in competitive situations. I don't like the way it feels.

I get irrationally worked up by comparison and always feel bad when watching a team sport where everything comes down to one person and they fail. Missed field goals and penalty kicks actually make me cry.

This all goes out the window when playing a board game, of course, which we do relatively often in my house. That's how I knew that the question Iba and I were really asking when he asked about mistakes and I asked for feedback was "How do I win?"

Eric offered us the same reminder I'd gotten all those years ago in Pre-K: That there are no mistakes in art, and that "winning" only comes from creating something you're excited about.

I was reminded, perhaps for the 300,000th time in my life, that it is more important to try than to win.

If there are no mistakes in art, then it can't possibly matter how many likes my Instagram Reel gets. If there are no mistakes in art, then surely it's okay to write a very rough draft. If there are no mistakes in art, then what does it matter whether or not I've done something perfectly? I did it, and that's what counts in the end.

This is a lesson I am always learning and probably will be until the end of time. At each stage of my life—as my work becomes more public, more personal, more vulnerable—I find myself due for the reminder again.

Only I can determine whether or not I like the smell of a candle. Only I can decide what “good enough” looks like for me.

There is no doing it perfectly. There is no A+ to be earned.

There is only the doing, the trying, the "keep showing up"-ing, and the intrinsic rewards that come from the process itself.