Discontentment and growth

Writing for personal enjoyment is hard. I am a very deadline-driven girl. I thrive on making the most out of those last precious seconds before something is due. Without a deadline, I have time to stare at my writing. My last article sat there as a sad, unfinished draft for about a week before I could bring myself to put the finishing touches on and consider it worthy enough to hit the publish button and release it into cyberspace. I still find myself rereading things and editing punctuation and moving words around, but I guess that's how we make improvements. I had viewed imperfection as a curse until recently. If I didn't see imperfection, I would have no reason correct mistakes and make an effort to improve. Imagine if you learned the alphabet as a child and was like 'well that's a pretty impressive array of knowledge, I'll stop here'. The world would be a muddy experience of mediocracy. Instead of being content with our astonishing knowledge of the ABCs, we became curious about reading. We were frustrated by the fact that our parents could look at a page of all of these letters and make sense of it. And so through disappointment and anger at our shortcomings, we flourish.

That isn't where things stop, though.