Every time I open my Obsidian to start writing a new blog post, I remember the other 15 drafts sitting there. Will those ever see the light of day? I don’t know. And that’s a concern for me.
It’s easy to take ideas and put them into two or three phrases. But being able to write for a long time (I’m Gen Z—two hours is a long time for me, don’t judge) is just hard to do if I’m not in the mood. And in the last few months, the one thing I haven’t found is the mood.
I’d like to write about a lot of different things: my trip to Europe (the first one, by the way), my studies on DST (jokes aside for Brazilians, I mean Deterministic Simulation Testing), my studies on Distributed Systems. But I’m just not in the mood to write. Why? I don’t know.
I do believe I’ve really fallen into the perfectionism trap for writers. I can’t count on one hand the number of drafts I was genuinely proud of last year. There’s always something missing—a phrase, a section, a requirement. That’s what I call the perfectionism trap: when you look at the work you did, and all you can see are the gaps and how far you are from the final result.
But what is the final result? Sometimes I don’t even know. It’s just the feedback loop of never feeling satisfied with what I wrote. It took me a while to understand it. Even now, I don’t fully know where it comes from. Maybe I’m comparing myself with other authors and trying to be like them? Yes, maybe. Maybe I’m too focused on how the text is structured and not on whether the quality of what I’m producing is good enough to be read? Maybe that too.
My blog never was, and never will be, a platform just for the public. It never was. My blog is about having a place where I can share all my things—from cooking recipes and board game reviews to a 4,000-word wall-of-text book review or a report on my learnings from building a compiler from scratch.
It was never about being shorter or longer, but about whether, in essence, it represents my thoughts and my spirit at that moment. But I’m not sure when I lost that idea.
In the end, to escape the perfectionism trap, it requires understanding that perfection isn’t about a single piece of writing (or anything else) but the composition of the whole body of work (and in this case, I’m not talking only about writing).
What matters now is that I’ve found myself again and rediscovered the road I missed a long time ago. There’s a lot of work to do here.