Perfection’s Imperfection

Liahm Blank / CREATIVE NON-FICTION

I sit in the corner of a black room. My computer, a warden, restrains me to my leather chair and forces its blue light into my bloodshot eyes, as if its intention is none other than the interrogation of every blood vessel in the glazed whiteness. I stare back in stubborn contempt at the brightness of the screen, letting the blinking cursor pulse an ugly rhythm; its body flashes, waiting, expecting, determined to devour the next line of my essay. The clock reads 12:02 a.m. I am nervous to write the next line for fear that my words will jumble and rearrange, or otherwise fall to the bottom of my screen and gather like dust at the end of my writing. Each sentence must be perfect, with the exact phrasing I envision, and each word must claw its way out of my brain to fight for its spot on the page. My hands hang limply on the swollen keyboard, their joints frozen into solid blocks or simply meshed into that which refuses to type. I blink. It takes more than willpower to force my cement eyelids and anvil eyelashes to uncover my unfocused eyes, allowing me to stare blankly into the ivory abyss again. A knock at the door. My brother. 

“You forgot to eat dinner.” He opens the door enough so that the darkness may consume his features. 

“I don’t care. Get out,” I snap. 

He leaves without another word, forcing me to soak in the darkness and my own moral failings after the click of the door handle seals me in the cell of my own creation. My laptop leers at me from its moral high ground, as if my incapacity to write anything worth reading, along with my inability to maintain my humanity while doing so, constitutes a level of failure so great that the closed windows and black walls are justified in imprisoning me. I rub my eyes with the balls of my fist until I see spots. Why do I put myself through this? I think. For the A, the voice in the back of my head hisses. 

Out of nothing more than spite, or disdain for the essay in front of me, I vomit a sentence onto the page. Though I am nervous, I spew out another. And another, until hateful momentum gives way to some quasi-readable paragraph. Even then, I find myself doubting, pressing the backspace button into oblivion and destroying more words than I had written. I sit in interrupted darkness, surrounded by deleted words and unwritten sentences slipping between my fingers into a lake of marching time that tries to pull me under. The clock reads 12:34 a.m. The cursor continues to force its disgusting heartbeat into my pale face. Every sentence I write turns into mold, corrupting the sentences around it until letters in Times New Roman appear as wicked spores rotting a white page. 

Black words on a white screen start to scream when you stare at them for long enough. A sentence sneaks itself onto the page. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. But the clock reads 12:57 a.m., and my tired hands refuse to reach for the delete key again. I am nervous to write the next sentence. 

To write is to justify every comma; it is to doubt every word and question every letter in the pursuit of perfection. My head swims from the black and white that swirls into the dark room like a hypnotic lagoon carrying the sharp edges of semicolons and em-dashes. I tiptoe through the minefield of my own anxiety, of my need to only write that which is nothing less than incontrovertibly flawless, and wade through the rest of my essay, a loitering tragedy that leans menacingly against the margins. 

1:27 a.m. It is done.

I hate the essay I have written. I hate that I have started something so vile and dragged it to completion. I hate myself for hating the essay. My computer screen fades to black, reflecting a hunched silhouette of a discontented overthinker, with hair wild from the uncooperative hands that ran through it countless times, leaving marks on my scalp. What have I become? What have I become? 

Weeks later, I receive an A+ and a 'Good work!' from my English teacher. The validation that once fueled my academic motivation no longer justifies anything for me. I am still learning that the hours of sleep I get are more important than the number of my GPA. I am still learning that dinner is not something I can skip in order to perfect just one more sentence. I am still learning that striving to be perfect will leave me crippled by anxiety before I ever begin: the toll of perfectionism is procrastination born not from laziness, but from fear of showing some inadequacy or shortcoming in my own performance. With every break I take from academics, with every additional hour of sleep I achieve, and with every deep breath I take to remove the pressure I place onto my newly un-hunched shoulders, I learn the art of relaxing. Perfection is a veneer, a door of which I never want to see the other side of again. And with that, I leave the period from the end of my essay as a means of symbolically rejecting everything that is perfectly complete and completely perfect