What is this feeling?
This obsession with perfect writing? This unending and constantly nagging need of being better at writing, at expression, at using words that can’t be used in any other way once you’ve read them, in that sentence, in that order? Or better yet, finding the exact turn of phrases that clutches someone by the spine and whispers, “No other words will do”? It is this ache that arrests you mid-breath, so precisely cut from the fabric of human wonder that it had to be said this way and no other. It does not inform— it possesses.
It is a hunger that wakes up in me, walks with me, sits on my chest, cutting off my breath as I try to fall asleep. It’s not ambition. It’s not even perfectionism. It’s a type of creative possession. It is akin to being haunted by a language that doesn’t yet exist, but insists that you are the only one who can translate it into this world. No one understands. Yet, they casually ask,
“What is your obsession with perfect writing?”.
“Will you see the human in my being?”
Obsession with Perfect Writing
Our minds—or my mind, I like to imagine- is a vast, empty mansion. Every corridor, every door, every staircase is absent with half-forgotten metaphors, unsaid things, memories sealed and dusty. There is an eeriness and a haunted silence that permeates the space. But if you look closely, behind the dusty hallways, it is a cramped, “filled to the brim” kind of place with secrets and forgotten memories etched on the walls. They are like bitter herbs I have chewed on for years. There are rooms in me that I have never entered, except in dreams. The air always smells of candle wax and lost time.
And there it is—
The subconscious, the entity that lurks and is like an observant beast. It watches me all day, noting my every move, collecting them like beads on a string, marking events that it will use tonight to torment me at 3 am. It will make me toss and turn. “Why did you say this in 2025?”, or “You remember this?”, it whispers.
Why can we never rest? Never be at peace? I thought this was the cost of caring too much. Now, I think it’s a curse of being able to imagine more than one reality. There is an obsession with perfect writing. This duplicity is the realm of poets, writers, lovers, and drunkards— parallel universes where the perfect thing is said, the perfect lines written. Every missed beat echoes longer in us; the fear that we have disappointed our muse is a torture worse than death.
“To be inspired by the mundane, where others just live through. To carry the burden of expressing that inspiration, and not being at peace until you do…that is the burden of the creative artists.”.
Calmness. Concentration. These aren’t states of being that we can achieve in this lifetime. These are myths. How can you be ay of them, when you are “sealed” inside your head? When your skull is the stage and every voice inside wants the spotlight?
A blank page. It is a horror beyond comprehension. A mirror with no reflection. It is an ache. It is a primal hunger that hasn’t been satiated for eons. To close the gap, to reap some peace, to toil for stillness, to become who I was meant to be— it all depends on the next word, the next sentence that comes out of my mind.
There is a moment of stark silence in this symphony so that when the crescendo shatters, it shall drown me with it. The echo of my screams left to wander in the ethers.
“You start looking into the abyss long enough, and something looks back. The thing is that something isn’t always entirely unfamiliar.”
And so I keep trying. I collect these beautiful words like sea glass. I rearrange them obsessively, chasing a kind of high. It is my personal alchemy, my own blend. This is my cocktail.
Where feeling becomes form.
Where silence becomes song.
And maybe—just maybe—someone else will read it, and feel a little less sealed inside their own head too. But that is not something I will be here to witness.
External Links
- To dismantle the myth of perfection, check out ‘Bird by Bird’ by Anne Lamott (especially the chapter “Shitty First Drafts”.