When he was younger, my eldest would erase until the paper tore.
He would not cross a mistake out. He rubbed at it, over and over, until the page went thin and grey and sometimes wore clean through. I would tell him, before it got that far, that it was good enough. I meant it. He heard it and it did not reach the place the worry lived. And when the paper finally tore, he did not want my reassurance. He wanted a fresh worksheet, a clean page with no history on it.
Most days I did not have one. So we sat with the torn page, the two of us, and the afternoon bent around it.
There was a picture in his head of how the thing should look, clean and finished and correct, and there was the thing his hand could actually make. The distance between the two was unbearable to him.
I told him, gently, that the smudges were okay. That it was perfectly acceptable. That no one would see his erasing as a failing.
A part of me wrenched when I saw his frustration at not being able to have a perfect, clean copy of his writing. I understood this feeling.
No one ever scolded me for perfectionism. That is not how it showed up.
It showed up in my handwriting.
I was a good student, so my teacher was kind about it. She would only say, gently and on many different occasions, that my writing was very difficult to read. I felt ashamed of the feedback, and I remember the feeling to this day.
When I wrote at the speed my thoughts moved, the letters ran into each other and closed up, and no one could read them. I tried to fix it. I could not. The letters shut again the moment my hand caught up with my head.
It looked like something I was failing to tend to, that I did not care, but it was the opposite. I tended to it constantly.
I studied my friends’ handwriting, the round, even letters that sat on their lines with perfect spacing. I copied the shapes and spent hours wishing my hand could make a page that looked like theirs. There was a gap between the clean, beautiful page in my head and the one my hand produced.
I became obsessed with writing beautifully.
By junior college I had closed that gap the only way I knew how. I turned writing into a ritual, and I was praised, then, for beautiful handwriting.
What no one saw was the cost of it.
For my essays I would write the whole thing out in draft and then copy it again in my best hand. If I made a single mistake in the copying, I would start the page over rather than reach for correction tape. The tape left a mark, and the mark meant the page was no longer clean.
I spent more time making the essay beautiful than I spent thinking about what it said.
The thing my teacher had named so gently had not gone anywhere. I had simply learnt to hand in the clean copy and hide the working, and the hiding looked, from the outside, like excellence.
Somewhere in all that copying and starting over, I stopped seeing it as a thing I did and started seeing it as a thing I was.
A person who wasted time.
A person who could not leave well enough alone.
A person who made everything harder than it needed to be.
I did not hold that verdict at arm’s length. I took it in. I built a life on top of it.
For years I believed the working itself was the flaw, that the crossings-out and the long labour and the pages begun again were evidence of something wrong with me, and I tried to rub them away the way my son rubbed at his worksheet, until the page wore thin.
And it kept costing.
It cost me most at university.
I could not be concise. Everything I read felt important. Every nuance needed clarifying. The research never ended and the writing started late and then grew far beyond the size the assignment had asked for.
Those nights have blurred, but I remember the panic: a report due in the morning, the desk under a lamp, the report half written but already several times longer than the word limit. Me reading through it over and over, unable to decide which paragraph was allowed to go.
I cut a sentence and put it back.
I cut it again and put it back again.
The sky went from dark to dawn.
I handed in the report just in time. I got a distinction, but all I remember now is the exhaustion.
It became a pattern: the all-nighters, the impossible word counts, the agony of deciding what could be left out, because it all mattered.
The As and distinctions came at the cost of sleep, leisure, and a low, steady guilt whenever I tried to rest.
I read the results as proof that the method was right. I did not read the exhaustion as proof of anything.
It caught up with me more than once. I burnt out, recovered, and burnt out again.
Eventually I thought I had learnt. In reality, I had simply swung the other way.
I began finishing things weeks early, afraid of the last-minute person I had been. I was proud of the change. Yet a deadline a month away could make me anxious enough to feel I had to start that same day. Plenty of time never felt like plenty.
I would finish early and then read the thing again and again, long past the point of any use.
I had moved the perfectionism, not outgrown it.
There was still no balance in it, only a new version of the same thing.
Watching my son reminded me that the gap is allowed.
His gap was allowed.
Mine, somehow, never had been.
Because here is what kept happening in the years when he still erased. I would sit beside him and read his version of the trait without judgment. The gap is unbearable to him, I would think, and the thought carried nothing but tenderness.
And then, on some ordinary afternoon, with my hand on his back, the thought would turn around and point the other way.
The gap was unbearable to me too.
It had always been unbearable to me.
And no one had ever once put a hand on my back and called it anything other than difficult to read.
He does not erase like that anymore. The years have passed, the way they do.
But the gap is still in him, in different forms, and when it surfaces I tell him what I told him then.
That the smudges are okay.
That the marks are allowed to show.
That life is not perfect.
And every time I say it I hear, underneath, the other voice, the one saying the same words to a girl forty years back who needed them and did not get them.
She is gone, and I am what she became, and there is no address to send the mercy to.
I can see now that what I called a flaw was simply a way of being made that the people around me had no language for.
I was not careless.
I was not difficult.
I was a person who felt the distance between the imagined and the real more sharply than most.
I cannot give the years back.
That is the truth I have landed on, and it is not a tidy one. The understanding arrives decades after the price was paid, and it cannot reach the person who paid it. That person was me, before I knew. I cannot go back into those rooms and put my hand on my own small back.
The grace runs in only one direction now.
Forward.
Towards him.
I can give him what I was not given.
I can tell him the working is allowed to show.
I cannot give it to her.
There is no clean page.
That was the thing perfectionism promised and could never deliver: a life handed in without the working, without the crossings-out, without the marks that show where you have been.
I spent decades trying to erase mine.
You cannot.
The years are the marks.
They are the proof of where I have been.
They do not rub away.
If you have read The Weight I Cannot Put Down, you will know the guilt this sits beside, though this is a different weight. The same recognition arrived through my youngest, in a different shape. He feels everything, the way I always did, and I wrote that down in A Heart Like Mine. And the name I gave the whole undertaking is in Why I Called It Grow with Their Flow. And if you have started to wonder whether the faults have a name, The Long Way to the Room walks the long path to finding out.
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