The Courage of Imperfect Things

This is one of my favourite photos.. It's not the sharp, detailed kind you might see in textbooks, but a beautiful bumble bee blur, wings smeared with motion, hovering somewhere between accident and art.

I've lost count of the hours I've spent polishing work only to hide it away. The closer something got to being finished, the heavier it became. So many of my creations: almost good enough, almost ready, almost worthy of being seen.

Brooke Shaden helped me realise that creativity isn't about making masterpieces, it's about making things at all. She runs challenges where the only rule is to declare your work finished, whether you love it or not. No overthinking, no apologies, just: This exists now. The more I released "imperfect work" into the world, the lighter I felt. I did Brookes Creative July last year and imagined, shot, edited and released one piece of conceptual art every single day in July, 31 pieces of art that could've stayed trapped in my hard drive (or worse, my mind). Some make me cringe now. Some make me proud. But what matters most isn't their quality, it's that I showed up. I let each image stand, unedited by doubt. The weight that lifted when I stopped demanding perfection was physical, like I finally remembered to breathe.

So many of us know the weight of imposter syndrome - that persistent whisper that we're not quite enough. But when I imagine looking back years from now, my greater fear isn't that I was imperfect or that someone didnt think my photo was sharp enough but that I lacked the courage to share my imperfect self with the world.

Creation is an act of faith. Not faith in perfection, but faith in process, in showing up, in letting the thing be what it is. A photograph can be blurry and still hold truth. A poem can be unfinished and a story can be unresolved.

So here's my invitation to you: Find that half-finished poem, that abandoned sketch, that melody you've been humming but never recorded. Put it somewhere it can breathe. Let it be imperfect. Let it be alive. The world doesn't need more polished things; it needs more real ones.