an antidote to perfectionism

Everyone can make cool shit.

The fucking Victoria & Albert museum has shoeboxes full of zines people made in a week on a busted typewriter and a stolen photocopier to throw at people in their school or their music scene, and half of them would probably be mortified that one of the 100 copies they made of their diary entries cut and pasted over comics about their ex got scanned and uploaded onto the internet archive and is being taught by strangers to stranger strangers. They’re raw, cheap, too personal and riddled with errors - and it fucking rules.

Then there’s all that perfect shit, the typo-free glossy art and writing that you immediately know is going to be in universities, even down to the fact that the font they used looks more expensive than the same font thrown on your docs.

The messy scraps of people's creativity is cool shit and the pristine masterpieces are cool shit. Everyone can make cool shit.

But you can’t make cool shit.

Not now. You can have made cool shit in the past - the stuff you hold yourself to now, which felt flawed in the moment but gets rosier the further you get from it, that you wish you could manage today - and you could make cool shit in the future - some unknown version of you, somehow free from everyday life and the little problems that keep you stuck, who unlocks some secret potential that’s felt like it’s eluded you in the moment for your whole life, yet somehow you can spot in yourself looking back and are convinced you’ll have eventually - but you can’t do it today.

Cool shit is made by you yesterday or tomorrow, and other people whenever they do anything.

It’s not cool to make cool shit.

Making anything means taking a potentially perfect idea from the idyll of your mind and forcing it to exist in imperfect actuality. It’s the opposite of the lie we tell kids when their dog dies. Your creative project was off on the farm, running around with its booker prizes and pulitzers and oscars and being photographed poking out of your favourite celebrity’s luggage, then we took it out back and forced it to limp around, smelling damp with its mangy fur and wrong number of teeth.

Then your reward for the one thing worse than killing your darlings - making them live - is that you become incredibly vulnerable, having to admit you care about something enough to take an action.

Loads of actions actually - wrestling with making it extant, figuring out what imperfections you’ll have to leave because otherwise it’ll end up abandoned and never even get to be uncool shit and what imperfections you’ll have to fix else you’d rather tear your eyes out than let anyone see it in this state, finish it even after the fun parts are done and the momentum’s left you.

Then it’s done and god forbid, you actually have to show someone. And you’ll agonise on how to do it but it’ll all boil down to staying “Hi, I’m just some person but I made some art about it. I guess I think I’m that fucking special. Please look at it because this matters to me.” Fuck. Can you imagine? And then people look at it! Never the right number, either. Either it’s so few that it feels like it doesn’t matter or it’s way too many and it feels like it matters far too much.

It’s not cool to make cool shit and you’ll have always made it as yourself, never the perfect version you’ll be in the future or the charmingly imperfect person you were in the past who felt all the same weird stuff about themselves but you can look back on with kindness you didn’t have then. No, now you’re just as fucked as you were then but older, should know better, are more tired, and you haven’t had a chance to forgive yourself for whatever you’ve got going on now yet. You can only make shit.

So your only option is to not make anything, or make shit anyway.

You’re everyone else’s someone else, so to all the people you aren’t, your shit will be cool shit. You’ll either be their friend whose work you love and hype up to everyone who’ll listen, or their stranger who’s cool shit they either torture themselves comparing their incomplete shit to, or gets them so motivated they want to make their own shit.

Putting everyone else’s shit aside, you’re your past self’s future self and your future self’s past self. Your current shit is the shit they were looking at when they were judging their shit.

Your shit will become cool shit.

Right now, you’re too close to it. So it feels like it’s just shit. But you’ve done cool shit in the past, and you’ll do cool shit in the future. You’ll make cool shit again.

The next thing you make will be cool shit one day. Even in the worst case scenario where you end up hating it, you made something. Someone who sees it will love it more than you do and more than you expected they would/could. You practiced taking action and got yourself a step closer to the next cool shit you make by doing this shit. And more than anything, inaction is an action, and there’s nothing worse than never doing your ideas. They’re not even shit. The only way to 100% guarantee they won’t be anything good to come of something you make is to not make it.

So we make shit anyway.

If you’ve made it this far, I want you to make shit. And I want you to help me make shit.

I’ve not been writing and I’ve not been publishing because I needed to write all that to myself. If you needed to read it too, let’s give each other some momentum and make cool shit together.

Make something. Anything. Start right now. If you’re reading this, you can almost definitely get started right now even though you’ll probably tell yourself you can’t. It doesn’t have to be perfect, because it can’t be perfect. It just has to be. It can be anything from a single poem or sketch to writing up a concept of something you always wanted to do but never did to an entire zine that you think is shit but could end up in the V&A thanks to one cool curator who took a shine to it.

Make something now. You have to finish it this week.

By the end of the week, send it to me. I’ll publish it in a big collection of cool shit.*

(*Only one rule - don’t be an asshole. I’m not going to publish bigoted shit. I’m not putting racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, etc shit on my websites.)

I’ll publish it by the week after, because I’m not allowed to be a perfectionist about this either. It’ll be published online so everyone can see their shit and each other’s shit real easy, and I’ll make a printable PDF zine version of it too, so everyone who wants a physical scrappy zine copy of it to hold in their hands and make its way into a museum can do that, without me having to deal wit>h the printing costs and pricing and shipping that’ll get in the way of immediately doing cool shit and make it less accessible anyway.

Start it now, finish it this week, send it to antidotetoperfectionism@gmail.com

Thanks for reading, I love you, I love this, I love how things are so exciting and so possible once I get out of the way of my own shit.

Now go make cool shit.

The above was written in one sitting on a Sunday night and shared the next morning, unedited, before the energy behind it could subside. What follows is everything that was sent in response over the following week, presented in the order it was recieved.

Bio:

honor ash is a songwriter and poet from Norwich. She believes that every poem is a love poem.

Alright! Time to overthink this.
Feeling first then
Thought invents
The sin to justify.

You are afraid
Almost all the time.

Imagine for a moment,
Your punishment
Has some kind of end goal, a destination,
Any metaphor to make it make sense when
So much love
Cascades your way.

Imagine yourself innocent.
Note to self:
Listen to why she loves you.
Start here, and here, and here

Bio:

Taeside is a Norwich-based poet and ex-teacher. She has an unhealthy affinity for pringles. Fun fact: she is gay.

We played a messy game
of pass-the-parcel
for years. I was always
returned to sender
before anything could
really get started,
a gift
too difficult
to open,
or so I was told.

Now, I unwrap the layers
of the present
to offer what I find
to myself.
Learning, as I go,
how to belong
in the world
in the moments
when the music
stops.

Bio:

Sara Collie (she/her) is a Norwich-based poet with a PhD in French Literature and a lifelong fascination with the way that words and stories shape and define us. You can find her wherever the wildflowers are currently blooming or discover her published work at saracollie.wordpress.com/writing

Bio:

Alexia is a writer, collager and noticer in the Middle, aka Birmingham. She runs Back To Books Brum @backtobooksbrum as a radical, queer & feminist community bookspace when spoons allow. Art @neon_pony__

There is a sunlit spot on the window seat,
where light pours in thick as honey,
where warmth collects like a held breath.
I sit there.
I do not move.

Outside, the world is running.
I hear it in the rhythm of trainers on pavement,
in the chatter of dogs off-leash,
in the hiss of bus brakes and the clatter of wheels,
in the shuffle of a child skipping over cracked slabs.
It is all moving.

Inside, my body is a locked door.
A house with faulty wiring, a leaking roof.
The bones ache, the muscles stiffen,
fatigue spreads thick and slow,
a fog crawling in under the front door.

And then the thought—
because there is always the thought—
if I am already this tired, this brittle,
if my limbs already resist the weight of the day,
how will I carry a child?
How will I hold them when they cry?
How will I chase after them, scoop them up, spin them laughing?
How will I be what they need
when I am not always what I need?

The sun moves, shifts its shape,
abandons the carpet to shadow.
The warmth leaves,
and I am still here,
sitting.
Waiting.

Wondering how much of this life
will be spent watching,
and how much of it
I will get to live.

Bio:

Nia Cain (They/He) is a Norwich based creative spirit, drawn to adventure and the outdoors with their dog Obi. Through art, writing, and music, they are learning to navigate the complexities of disability while finding joy in the world around them.

If you have any issues playing this video locally on our site, you can click through to view this video on youtube here.

Bio:

‘Vinegar Pond is a video collage by Kirsty O’Rourke. See more of their work here

And I dunno, man, I guess when I was sat in that steam room on the verge of a panic attack, thinking of all the stuff I had to do, and how I accidentally slept in, and how this swim-‘n’- steam was supposed to be a relaxing start to the morning, and how I’ll start this new job and have to get up for work in the morning, and how much life-time I’m gonna lose working to live, and how the heat I’d intended to clear my pores feels kinda stifling, and how this gym makes me so sad and I’m gonna miss it awfully, I guess at that point I was annoyed when you walked in and sat down next to me.

And I dunno, man, I guess I had some unfair preconceptions when I heard your thick Norfolk accent and saw your aging, tattooed skin, hair scraped into a ponytail as you moaned about the sauna being broken, and I guess I instinctively pulled up my knees and crossed my arms over my chest, because you are a man, man, and I’m aesthetically a woman and we’re both near naked here, and I guess I wasn’t gassed to find I couldn’t have my panic attack in peace.

But, I dunno, man. Then you started talking about your wife and your trip to Wales to see the grandkid, and how much you love that campervan ‘cause you can park for free right near the beach, and all the places you used to travel to on your motorbike, across the channel with your lady wrapped around you, and the villages in Italy with their perfect cheese-cube houses, and the Thailand sands that taught you both how to party until 7am, and the bars in Cambodia where you found friends from home you didn’t even realise you’d missed, and how the people in India were the most beautiful you’d ever met, and how I was still so young and had to travel while I could, and then you stood to walk across the pool because it was better for your joints and it lets you get your steps in, and I dunno man, I guess it’s ‘cause I was on edge already, but I just wanted to sob at how you could be so kind and inspiring when it’s not even mid-morning yet, and I guess it’s just that, without knowing it, you put into perspective how much time there is for everything and I dunno, man, I just think you’re better than you’ll ever know, I guess.

Bio:

Cathleen Davies is a writer, researcher, and teacher from East Yorkshire, England. Her work has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. She writes literary fiction for LGBTQ+ audiences. Their three solo collections Cheeky, Bloody Articles; And Marvel; and Fluid have been published by 4horseman publications.

Bio:

Bryony Mason is a Fine Art student at Norwich University of the Arts mainly focusing on collage and found text works. Creating short poems from the existing media she finds in newspapers, books, and leaflets found for free or bought second hand, Bryony aims to use the familiar and often disregarded to create something meaningful and compelling. Find her on Instagram at @artist.bryony

Bio:

Anya Gant is a Norwich University of the Arts Fine Art student using a variety of mediums in their work, such as paint and ink. They also enjoy digital art, photography and text work as shown here. Find them on Instagram at @anyaarts._

There’s a fluffy little ocean
Pooled in my lap
A tidal flurry pouched in her slumber
Eyes creased in lullaby
Pink velvet button stirring the air we share
I plumb down the tip of my breath
To nestle it there
And find out what all the fuss is about
Before I feel myself float off
In dream.

Bio:

Leia (she/they) is a Scotland based poet working to support carers in their local community. For 20 years they thought the lyric ‘twisted firestarter’ was ‘terrific firestarter’ in The Prodigy’s classic banger ‘Firestarter’.

Here is the fable.

Two men meet from different worlds and they both have a different word for The Thing.

They cannot agree on a word for it, they both think their word is the best.

And they argued and argued about the best word until one man killed the other.

And then he had no one to argue with about the best word for the feeling of loss

Bio:

g healy makes stuff

I wish it was spring all the time

But if it was spring all the time

I wouldn’t feel the overwhelming relief that the first sunny day in slog of grey clouds brings

Would it be possible to appreciate an eternal spring

I think I’d try

You hear the first drop of rain before you feel them and for a moment it feels like a dream
Suspended in space moments before a downpour

We are strange and beautiful creatures

The thing about eating healthy is that I keep having to buy fruit
The kitchen has become overrun with
Clementines/ tangerines / satsumas
And I’m not sure what the difference is other than they are great this time of year
And Maya laughs because I can’t help saying it every 3 pm when it’s
Clementine / tangerine / satsuma time
Which should grow tiresome but instead they smile and beat me to the punchline
Clementine/ tangerine / satsuma season will be over soon
And I refuse to eat a sad dry bitter fruit
They’re just better this time of year

Every nature poem reads the same

If you sit still long enough you’ll become part of the landscape, a home for spiders webs and a perch for tired damson flies

It’s a warm bright October afternoon & I think we’re all the same

The same ducks drying their wings in the sun, robins eating the last of the blackberries,

I remember the whimsy of being five

The same as I remember the whimsy of being 17 and

I think that’s why I get on with everyone

I’m doing an escape room

I’m walking to work on a cool September morning listening to paramore & feeling the the back to school anxieties of my 14 year old self

How did I End up here

Bio:

Freya Elise is a queer paper cut illustrator inspired by folk art, nature and magic. Instagram: @freyaelise

Ganymede is (as far as we know)
The 8th largest object orbiting the sun
and it orbits the (as far as we know)
Largest object orbiting the sun and
some of us think it likely has (as far as we can tell)
Three magnetic fields acting on it
which cause (some of us have claimed)
The strange banding of aurorae observed
around the middle of each hemisphere

when the attachments around my spine hum into my hips I ask again what's wrong with me that my percussive joints can crack their little radiations into orbit and hang heavy now around my jaw

I remember being young and watching Blue Planet (1)
In the big sweeping flatpack chair
with my feet on the beanbag
And the humpback whale is trying to get herself
between the pod of Orca and her calf
Pushing it to the surface until it gets too tired
And Attenborough sadly pronounces her failure
as the scene transforms into a whalefall
so we can learn from this how nothing is ever wasted

I want to say I'm drowning but succumbing feels more like breathing than breaking the surface ever did and I wonder if I sink too readily to rot and marine snow too keen to nourish and dissolve under too many mouths to feed alive

Ice floats because the water molecules stick together in hexagons
Load spread evenly across itself and rigid full of spaces
(or so it always looked in clicking mismatching
spiked plastic atoms and soft hollow bonds)
And iron falling into the oceans on the early earth reacted
With the oxygen in the water to make rust
And the chemical reaction of iron rusting in the water
Let the oxygen out *(We're pretty sure)

And I react to you like iron and water and pressure and rock like dried out peaty fields and tilled scarring soil desperate for the flow to be dammed and dug and diverted in some instinctive service

There have been groups of scientists observing Orca in Antarctica
And one at one time was concerned
For the matriarch of a pod that is sometimes observed
Moving together to make waves to wash their prey
From jagged havens now washed smooth
Dissolving floating sanctuaries
Exhausting
He hadn't seen her yet you see and missed her
Worried that food had become too scarce for her cunning

I tell myself if I ever move I might invite my favourite pigeons to make the journey with me so they can find me again if they like and never have to worry about food

We're still not sure why or how bees
make such perfect hexagonal honeycomb
If they measure with their bodies
or if that's just what happens to slightly warm wax circles
When you surround them on six sides with each other
But either way bees arrange isodiametric cylinders evenly in a pattern
And I wonder if the bees and water are quite sure
the shapes they make Are the right shapes
for what they're after

epistemology is my jam I said and there's too many knowings and knowledges and god can you give it a rest all the agonizing and obsessing and agonizing as if there was a wrong shape to condense into

The twin auroric shackling of Ganymede (Some of us suppose)
Is caused by it's triplicate magnetic field
One just like our own a core of spinning molten heat
One hidden salty ocean underneath it's crust
(some of us hope it is alive somehow or will be when we get our hands on it)
One field is not it's own
By its close orbit around the largest object (that we know)
Orbiting our sun

ease neglects coming easily in the asides and outpacings and the essayists paranoid picking at the peeling edges of paper thin skin scalded and pulling back from itself in the charring steam and I think I'm afraid to react and reaction is change

Bio:

Eddie Lambe is an occasional poet and sometimes househusband, who posts poems at @baathos and non-poems (including the favourite pigeons mentioned) at @eddiesheep2010

Bio:

Sallyanne Rock is a queer, neurodivergent poet from the Black Country. She is also an access support worker for artists, and solo parent of two teenagers. Recently she's been exploring ways to blend poetry with visual art, including drawing and textiles. Instagram @sallrockpoet

The most beautiful sight you'll ever behold
Is roughly 2pm on a summer afternoon
Some 10 or so years ago
Surrounded by your friends
And you won't even realise it
Until it's far too late

Parked in a docile green bathed in gold
A river trickles and bubbles cooly
In the shadows of a ruined church.
Collapsed and abandoned bikes stacked together
Form a monument to the carefree.
An idol to idleness.
A previously tossed frisbee adorned as its crown
Geometric and resplendent in its curves

Tinny dubstep rattles from the mono speaker
Of a LG Optimus
A smart phone with a touchscreen that doesn't cost hundreds
And proudly boasts a rear camera with megapixels in the double digits

The future is now.

Bio:

Oli Russell used to say they were a "guy that does poetry" over a poet, who "writes bad poetry about good friends". After some earnest feedback around negative self talk, Oli Russell now identifies as a Norwich based poet, who writes decent work on a range of topics.

The instigating manifesto / call for submissions came from a conversation about making cool shit and perfectionist paralysis, which took place in Lucy K Shaw’s ‘The Chapbook Factory’, a workshop series held by Shabby Doll House. Huge thanks to everyone involved in TCF 2025 for the inspiration, energy, encouragement and comraderie.

The conversation was sparked by discussing the 90s Riot Grrl zine ‘Glorianne: A Girl's Guide To Getting Involved’ - made in under a week and is all the better for its urgent energy and the scrappy outcomes of its tight deadline - which was a particular inspiration and can be read on the Internet Archive here. While I'm linking stuff, here's some of the zines at the V&A mentioned in the introduction too, also shared by Lucy in The Chapbook Factory.

The majority of these submissions are by poets and artists local to Norwich, birthplace of Placeholder Press and my hometown. Last year I moved away for a combination of health and love, but I am endlessly grateful for my home and miss it - and its poetry scene - fondly. Thanks to everyone in the community, all the local poets and events, but particularly Last Poet Standing, Volta, Poets In The Cellar and Cafe Writers.

Inspired by Glorianne and to encourage not being able to overthink the submissions, this project had a tight turnaround - the call for submissions was written in one sitting on the evening of Sunday 2nd March 2025, posted a few hours later on the Monday morning (the 3rd), stopped accepting submissions at the end of that week (the 9th), was published online the next Monday (the 10th), and I'm currently making it into a physical zine which I have to finish by next Monday (17th). Unlike Placeholder's normal submission process, which historically had a 3-10% acceptance rate, for this project everything that got sent in time has been included. It was a really novel way to approach the project and felt right for the raw, unedited feeling behind the concept behind it. Huge thanks to everyone who got involved for the leap of faith.

This is our first release since we went on hiatus, and I’m thrilled about it. Placeholder is so cool! This is our passion project! I’m passionate about it!

It means the world to get excited about an idea, share that excitement with people, then for them to be excited by it too and join in. It makes my day when someone emails me and says my passion and enthusiasm is infectious. Let’s do that over and over and over again.

We loved running Placeholder pre-hiatus, and I couldn’t be happier that we’re coming back, but we’re going to come back differently. We want to rebuild Placeholder from the ground up, writing a new blueprint of what it means to run our own project.

This issue only exists thanks to a conversation I had in a workshop series, sharing space with writers to be inspired and encouraged by each other. So much of the work in it is either from Norwich creatives who I’ve shared a scene with and built relationships with, or writers who I’ve crossed paths with online in one way or another. This entire project has been a constant reflection on the importance of community in our practice.

I feel the most excited by community and connection. Every time I get burned out, spun out, dissatisfied or stuck, it's because my practice has started feeling insular or lonely. That’s the core of the plan for Placeholder Press post-hiatus: If community and connection is the thing I love, appreciate and need the most, that should be the foundation of my publishing project.

The foundation of Placeholder Phase 2 will be holding workshops and offering support for writers and artists. By doing that, we'll be bringing together a bunch of cool people making cool things. From there, we can create opportunities to help people publish those cool things. Placeholder will be a community-first model which also runs a press to serve that community, rather than a magazine trying to do other things on the side.

As part of this, I’m so sure we’ll end up inspired to do other things, like more special issues of the magazine or another art show. The difference is this time, rather than that being the main aim of our work, those will be the natural progression of being energised by our core goal - gathering passionate creatives together and offering them workshops, support and connection.

Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll be announcing the first steps in this plan. We’re going to offer some informal writer support sessions, and we’re currently planning a workshop that will be held both in-person and online. For the time being, keep an eye on our instagram and facebook (@readplaceholder) and our website for details on these. We’re planning on setting up a mailing list soon too, so we have a more direct, personal way to keep in touch with the community we’re building, which we’ll announce on the same channels.

Placeholder is named after the idea of allowing for constant growth and change. These shifts feel like the right way to be true to that. For the same reason, exactly how Phase 2 looks and what the timeline is won’t be set in stone. We’ll be trying new things, seeing what works best for you and for us, and doing more of what excites us both. When every step inspires and energises the next, we’ll be building momentum that sustains itself. It’ll be led by community feedback every step of the way, which includes now, so we’d love to hear what you think of the plan and what you’d like to see from us.

We’re growing a garden, not cutting a bouquet, and we’re throwing the gates open for you. We’re so excited about it. We’re so happy to be back and to have you here. We’re holding a place for you.