Almost is Never Enough

What is it called when all I have ever wanted was to be perfect? I see many friends and acquaintances and strangers doing half the things I push myself so hard to achieve and their results far surpass mine. I am an author, I am supposed to be good at what I do, I write whenever I have time, but most time I spend, I sit and look at the lines on my paper, a blizzard of white pages. I have what I want envisioned in my mind, a movie playing out in my head of everything I know I want, but the pencil hits the paper, and I draw a blank.

I can close my eyes and dream of worlds where everything makes sense. The main character grows and becomes complex and does what they were destined to do, their friends helping them along the way. I see it, and I create a portrait, and I write what I see, then I stop. All the words are wrong, details are too abstract, sentences jump and don’t make sense. I tear at the pages, tears shedding with anger and frustration attached, pulling apart anything I had that could be worked on to become better. But I don’t want better. I want perfection from the start.

I wanted to be a writer, to have my work published before I passed the age of 16; however, that dream has long since fallen down the hole of my mind, my procrastination and mental state throwing what good qualities I have inside. Circling around the book section in stores fuels my anger and frustration, as I could have been one of them, with beautiful covers and wonderful stories presented to the world, yet all of my effort to become someone ends with a blank page and a blizzard of empty pages filling up the walls of my house and my mind, covering my mouth and my eyes, refusing to let me go.

I can hear my friends announcing,

“I know you can do it”

“Just try”

“All you need to do is write a few words”

They do not understand the feeling of knowing what you want, but being too far deep into regret and despair that the stories that bleed so beautifully inside my mind would only come out clotted and confusing. They can watch me struggle to find the words, and they will tell me to relax and think harder. I tell them I can’t, and they will laugh in my face and tell me I don’t try hard enough. I weep for my stories and tell them it’s not enough, I need more, I need perfection, but they do not get my mind. They look at me strangely, like I’m odd for thinking perfection is the only standard for my writing.

“You’re too hard on yourself,” they say, but perhaps they are not going hard enough on themselves. Perhaps if they did, they would see where my mind is. A jumbled mess when writing, focused on everything else but success.

Those are the perks of being a perfectionist. I expect everything to be done right the first time, not leaving any room for mistakes or stupidity, another flaw of mine that holds my neck in a chokehold, unable to let me breathe for one second without bringing tears to my eyes and thorns in my throat. My tears will soak the page, trying to erase the atrocities I attempted to create.

Sometimes, I have an epiphany and realize the words make sense. I think I finally painted the canvas a bright blue, until I look again. I see mashed-up letters and impossible sentences, unintentionally fragmented or fused with another. A story cannot be written like that. It’s dumb, unreadable, unrecognizable from what I had meant. This terrible thought surfaces in my mind. Why would anyone want to read an imperfect story? I tear the pages apart, CTRL + A + Backspace everything. My eyes burn, my head hurts, my hands are on my scalp, threatening to rip apart every follicle of hair on my head.

If I could envision what I want in my head and put it into a book, I could be rich by now with the stories I have created. I picture perfect plots and characters, but write ugly and evil, erasing the perfection of the piece I love, watering down the true meaning of the storyline.

I am so close to being good. So close to understanding what I do wrong. So close, yet so far. I think practice is the answer to my misfortunes in storytelling, but in a way, it has worsened them. I write until I can’t think, and then look to everyone else to see them writing mountains while I only wrote hills. Never enough words, never enough fancy writing, never enough detail. I practice still, though I never publish work or give it to my peers for feedback, I believe it will give me false hope that one day I will be able to write like the rest of them.

No. No matter how I try, I will never be able to be like them. I snuffed out my talent the moment I decided who I wanted to be. How dare I even think of becoming an author? I cannot even be good at my most favorite thing in life. I am drowning in contempt. If I had no eyes, I would not have to look at my disastrous path and worry about how I will live in the future with no future as an author. That is my life story. I make art with my words until the next day, where I find I had rambled on and on about a pointless plot, writing ideas that will never work. No matter how I try to fix it, my work will always stink of imperfection and stupidity, a gross underestimation of how I truly feel about the way I write and think. It is terrible what I have done to myself to make every attempt at creating a masterpiece look like garbage.