#24 What You Think Is Perfectionism Is Really Just Your Taste Demanding Integrity

Of all the miseries that attend the creative life, none is more persistent than the craving to make something worthy of your own judgment. You finish, and your dissatisfaction is immediate — a new disturbance, the sign that your taste still outstrips your hands.

Yet there are moments when you reread your own work and feel a strange stillness. For an instant, your desire is quiet. You did not settle. That pause, before the next impulse arises, is the only victory available — and it is not a small one.