The stack has a weight. Not just the physical heft of 22 sheets of 142-pound cold-press paper, but a psychic gravity. They sit on the corner of my desk, a monument to my own indecision. These aren’t the good ones. The good ones-all two of them-are framed, or at least propped up on a shelf, basking in the delusion that they might one day be framed. No, these are the others. The muddy landscapes, the portraits with one eye slightly higher than the other, the color studies that ended up looking like a toddler’s spilled juice. They are not good enough to keep, but apparently, they are too precious to throw away.

I used to be a devout archivist of my own mediocrity. I had boxes-so many boxes-filled with sketchbooks containing maybe three decent drawings and 92 pages of junk. I kept them out of a misplaced sense of reverence for ‘the process.’ What a lie. I kept them because I was afraid. I was afraid that if I threw them away, I’d have no proof of my work. That the hours would simply vanish, un-billed and un-logged, into the ether. It’s a ridiculous, materialistic, and deeply capitalist anxiety. The need to have something to show for your time.

The Stagnant Reservoir of Perfectionism

This is a terrible way to live and an even worse way to create. It turns the playground of your mind into a factory floor, where every doodle is subject to a quality assurance check. The pressure to produce a ‘keeper’ every time you pick up a brush is immense. It’s also the fastest way to kill the fragile, flickering impulse to make anything at all. You start measuring your materials, saving the ‘good’ paper for a ‘real’ project that never comes.

I am telling you all this, of course, while I can still feel the corner of that stack of watercolors digging into my palm. I criticize this impulse to hoard, and yet, here I am, hoarding. The contradiction is the most human part of it. We know what’s good for us, but the old habits, the old anxieties, they die hard. Like a final, twitching leg.

The Architect Who Unbuilds

I met a man once, an architect named Leo V.K. He didn’t build houses for people. He built dollhouses. Not for children, but for himself. He would spend weeks, sometimes months, on a single room. He’d lay miniature hardwood floors, distress tiny furniture with a jeweler’s file, and hang paintings the size of a postage stamp. He’d install wiring that made the little lamps actually work. The detail was staggering. He once spent 72 hours just getting the velvet on a miniature chaise lounge to look right. He showed me photos. They were breathtaking, these little worlds frozen in time. I asked him where he kept them all. He just smiled. He told me that after he photographs them, he takes them apart. Sometimes, for the more elaborate ones, he holds a small ceremony and burns them in a fire pit in his backyard.

This runs counter to everything we’re taught. We’re supposed to accumulate. Assets, accolades, artifacts. Leo was practicing a form of spiritual decluttering, but for the soul. He was making room for the next creation by letting the last one go completely.

Most of us aren’t building dollhouses to burn. But we can learn from the principle. What if we started projects with the explicit intention of destroying them? What if you bought a sketchbook not to fill, but to exhaust? To draw on every page, front and back, with no concern for the outcome, and then ceremoniously drop it in the recycling? You’d be free. You’d use the colors you were always afraid of wasting. You’d try that technique you were sure you’d mess up. You’d draw ugly, strange, wonderful things. Planning these temporary projects can be its own art form; I’ve started using erasable pens for initial sketches, leaning into the idea that the marks themselves are not sacred or permanent.

We photograph our food before we eat it, desperate to create a digital artifact of a fleeting meal. We are terrified of empty spaces, on our walls and in our calendars. The act of making something beautiful and then letting it go is a middle finger to that anxiety. It says that the experience was enough. The time was not wasted; it was lived.

There’s a tradition in Tibetan Buddhism of creating intricate mandalas from colored sand. Monks labor for days, pouring millions of grains of sand into breathtakingly complex patterns. They are prayers, meditations, maps of the cosmos. And when they are finished, after a period of contemplation, they are ritualistically destroyed. The sand is swept up and poured into a nearby river or stream, a symbol of the impermanence of all things.

Your stack of ‘failed’ watercolor paintings isn’t a monument to your lack of talent. It’s a record of your presence. A log of hours you spent paying attention. That’s not something that can be framed and hung on a wall. It’s something that gets woven into the fabric of who you are. The painting is just a souvenir of the real work.

Fuel for the Future

I’m looking at this stack of paper on my desk. There are 22 of them. I think I’ll keep two of them, not because they’re good, but because they remind me of a specific frustration I finally figured out. The other 20, though. Their time has come.

The ceremony won’t be as grand as Leo V.K.’s, but there’s a certain satisfaction in the crisp sound of thick paper folding in on itself before you drop it into the bin. It’s a sound of release.