The perfectionist within me sits, casually, lazily, warily yet unashamedly;

He looks at everything I do, each sentence fixatedly.

“This sounds wrong”.

“That doesn’t feel right!”

“The rhythm is wrong!”

That doesn’t even say what you wanted it to say!

And before we know it, there goes the rearranging of tiles as the kaleidoscope shifts from one broken iteration into another – before we know it, there the perfectionist is.

All cylinders fire, all hands are on deck.

The ‘mistakes’ fade, the ‘errors’ are blotted out – the gift of the perfectionist is handed out to its recipients, one after another.

But it is not a gentle gift.

Harshly it is given, critique after critique, self-assessment after self-assessment; no win, it declares, should be yielded through anything but sacrifice – no victory procured without an act of truth-telling; no satisfaction is earned but through looking clearly at oneself and understanding the answer to a simple question:

“Are you good or are you not good?”

I wonder about the perfectionist sometimes – whether he was there eternally, or maybe if he suddenly took on that role like Rasputin in the court of Count Nicholas; but whatever it is, there he had appeared one day, pushing me day after day, never brooking weakness, ever seeking greatness in an act of divine cruelty as he called me to go beyond my limits.

I began this piece wondering if the perfectionist would die as time would pass and the era might come, with a fixed answer in mind.

I leave realizing that he has a greater influence over my life than I knew.