Perfection

I am a perfectionist, especially when it comes to words.

My profession is making the printed word as close to perfect as I can—I’m a proofreader. My friend R.J. Zimmerman has even asked me to proofread his well-read and entertaining blog for him. He’s afraid that he’ll mistype something, and later be criticized for being less than perfect. Happy to help—and thrilled that my compulsive perfectionism has some practical use: I can help a friend feel more secure!—I adjust a comma here, fix a spelling error there, and realize that R.J. can’t tell the difference when I’m done, and most of his loyal readers can’t, either. All my picking does is give R.J. peace of mind, knowing that he will be protected from criticism if some other nitpicker, one who doesn’t adore him like I do, should wander into his blog. This is not likely to happen. What we readers notice are his great travel stories, his inspiring ideas, and the political comments that get us charged up to write endless comments. Even I wouldn’t notice those missing commas if it wasn’t for my inborn yearning to tweak every printed sentence I see.

Here’s what I’ve been noticing most of all, though: R.J. has been steadily posting a few times a week for over six months now. He posts long memories of his world travels, short blips about news stories that rile him, calls to action for his readers (Travel the world! Speak your mind!), and even a cute little blurb about eating dessert first. His spelling is imperfect, he sometimes puts in apostrophes where they don’t belong, and his sentences are not the most beautifully constructed in English literature. Meanwhile, my latest post on “Anita’s Weekly Column” went up three months ago. I did put up a New Year’s Day post just two months ago, but I later decided it was stupid, and so I took it down.

It’s not that I’m lacking ideas. I want to write about spiritual and scientific explanations, to show that we must keep both in mind in order to know what really happened, but first I want to reread two books and review a movie to make sure I have all of my quotes right and my evidence in order. I want to write about the beauty of ritualized cannibalism and how important it is to our cultural life, but my ideas are too scattered, and I never feel focused enough to get them all down. I want to write about the long conversation I had with a good friend about recurring severe depression, and explore my later realization that my favorite relative and many of my closest friends suffer from mental illness… but I don’t know what conclusion I’ll draw from that, what I’ll discover about myself when I put together everything I’ve learned from these people. I have such marvelous ideas that I don’t want to damage them by trying to write them down. I’m afraid they won’t be worth reading if I can’t express them perfectly. I’m afraid, if my arguments and my evidence and my punctuation aren’t all in order, nobody will want to read my ideas at all.

Meanwhile, R.J. blogs on and on, worried enough about his imperfections that he’s asked for my help, but still willing to put himself out there again and again. He has somehow managed to escape the paralysis of perfectionism, the disease that keeps me silent. I admire his courage. Maybe I can do it, too. I fix up his apostrophes, and recommit myself to put out one terrible, boring, short little column each week. I’ll read it six times before I post it. At least I’ll know that the commas are in the right places.