I’m definitely the first one — the editor and perfectionist. I guard my words like a hawk, never releasing them into the world until they adhere to my impossibly high standards. I’ve realized that it’s because I have a fictional version of the final draft that will never materialize, no matter how much I reread and re-edit everything.
I knew my work would never be perfect, but I was so obsessed with getting it as close to perfect as possible. Then I would look to my favorite journalists, aspiring to have the qualities they had, whatever they were. I was puzzled over how they could speak truth to power to flawlessly, every paragraph ended in a mic drop that I could never master.
I always compared myself to them, feeling like a fraud, like my work was meaningless.
I felt so bad about my work sometimes that I would stop writing and read a bunch of articles by “the pros”, wondering what I was missing, looking for the magic solution that would make my writing like theirs.
I never found it, and I was lost. I felt like the only thing I could do was edit, because I was so afraid of the critical eye of the readers. Well, my inner perfectionist was scared, you know? It’s become a part of me. It acts sophisticated when the time is convenient, but really, it’s scared senseless.
It took so long for me accept the fact that the only way to improve was to set my butterflies free, so to speak. But I still scream internally when I do it. Every time.
