The sanctuary of the unwritten; why I started a website

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Perfectionist’s Paradox

For as long as I can remember, I have been in a tug of war with perfectionism.

This manifests itself in two extremes; an obsessive drive towards my goals or a stifling, guilt-ridden avoidance of them. I rarely manage to glide sensibly in the grey area in between.

This trait has served me well on the whole, it has meant I have actualised a lot of my goals to reality, but it also has its drawbacks.

The Weight of a Blank Page

The clearest manifestation of this is my relationship with notebooks. I love a good notebook. I always want a new one when I have a new idea. I have a very strict criteria, 6-7mm ruling, thin faint lines (or sometimes squares) and heavy weight thick paper. The cover needs to be either simple and sophisticated or with a subtle yet unique design.

I have spent countless hours of my life in stationary shops looking for the perfect one. I can’t order them online; I need to hold them and touch the paper. I find the entire process quite therapeutic, scouring shops, debating how each notebook satisfies my stringent quality control checklist. Ultimately, the decision comes down to how the notebook makes me feel, I choose the one stirs up the most desire to write in.

But once I have bought it and brought it home, I am paralysed. I am too afraid to actually begin it for fear of making a mistake and ‘ruining’ it. The strive for the perfect notebook is futile as it remains forever empty and pristine, lacking even a slither of the life I imagined for it.

Tracing the Roots

This may sound silly (and dramatic) to some, but I have been the same since I was a young child. I vividly remember getting new school books at the start of the year and meticulously starting them with an exacting precision. My handwriting would be slow, measured and perfectly neat, any underlining would be done cautiously with a ruler and every mark I made on the page would be considered.

However, the moment I would make a mistake that would require a crossing out or my trusted Tippex, was the moment that this book would be mentally tossed to the imperfect pile. My standards for the book would gradually wither away. By the end of the year, my books were the scruffiest in my class, they were falling apart at the seam, barely legible and a stark contrast to my initial pristine intentions. This erosion of care was, of course, entirely subconscious.

This all-or-nothing pursuit of perfectionism is not unique to me, reassuringly people all over Reddit have described this exact phenomenon plaguing them also, (you can always count on Reddit to make you feel less othered). The suggestions to break out from this cycle all follow a similar message; just do it. Do it if even its not ‘perfect’, newsflash, nothing is.

The Comfort of the Invisible

Perfectionism for me is not about the obsessing over the quality of the work, its almost the fear of judgement or ‘failure’. As long as an idea lives only in my head, it remains in its perfect, untouchable state with infinite potential. It is safe because it does not exist yet. The moment it is committed to ink, it is subjected to the messy laws of reality. By not writing in the notebook I am protecting myself from having my ideas, thoughts and plans actualised and then scrutinised, even if only by myself.

Trading Perfection for Progress

Although this website is not a notebook, this analogy re-emerges across various facets of my life. There are so many things I want to do, writing more being one of them, but they often fall under the same empty notebook trap.

A website at least alleviates some of the fear of making a mistake. It offers the comfort of mutability; I can constantly update, refine, and smooth over the rough edges and pretend that the final product was always intended to be that way. Of course, that’s largely a facade, the Git history remains as an honest record of every mistake I edited away. Just writing, writing about anything, as consistent as I can and as well as I can is my goal with this website. Embracing the imperfect, iterative process of learning by doing, and documenting interesting things I figure out. I love to stumble across a website full of hidden gems, and it's time to stop spectating and start building my own. I hope this process gives me a sense of freedom from the rigidness of perfectionism and allow me to understand my quirk and use it to my advantage.