I’ve always been a perfectionist. As a child and teenager, and into my early twenties, if I couldn’t do something perfectly, if I couldn’t get a task or project exactly right, I wouldn’t do it at all. It was probably the biggest contributing factor to the mental breakdown I had towards the end of 2014. The biggest take-away from this ‘episode’ in my life is that as a young adult it’s important to learn how to ‘parent’ oneself.

For me, this parenting took the form of physical fitness and self-care (I started Krav Maga and learned how to meditate), proper nutrition (show me a twenty-four-year-old who eats right, I’ll wait), and the realization that life isn’t actually as serious as people would have you believe (specifically parents and high school teachers). Also, my Psychologist at the time said I should start writing again. Better late than never.

Photo by Pereanu Sebastian on Unsplash

Perfectionism is a blessing and a curse. I suspect that the degree to which it kills creativity is the degree to which it fuels work ethic in everything outside of it. But to be human is to be imperfect.

“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” — William Carlos Williams

The reason I stare blankly at a white piece of (digital) paper isn’t that I think I’m perfect. It’s not because I think I’m right, or even because I think I have something particularly meaningful to say. I don’t want to proselytize the right or the left, or this faith or that. I simply want to write about things that interest me, cement my own point of view, and then raise it up the flag pole to see who salutes. At that point, I sincerely hope someone pulls it down off the flag pole, sets it on fire and urinates on it (read: challenges me on it).

All I aim to do is explore philosophical questions and topics surrounding the human condition (as well as literally any topic that takes your correspondents fancy), endeavouring to explore perspectives often not given significant attention or ‘air time’ in mainstream media and/or social conversations with a view to build a more complete picture of the world.

Writing is about exploration. It’s about investigating unfamiliar ideas and concepts, and communicating them to the broader world in the hopes of beginning a discourse and educating one’s self even further. Writing can change someone’s life — it can help work through trauma, it can tell life-changing stories, it can communicate news from the other side of the world.

Writing is nothing short of magic.