Occupational disease?

I admit it; this moment may count as my official coming out.

‘Papers/document pile’ by Niklas Bildhauer, 2008, CC BY-SA 2.0

I am a perfectionist.

Many people suffer from this affliction: historians, but others as well.

Still, misconceptions about perfectionism abound, and I feel I must seize this occasion to set straight one particularly tenacious one.

We perfectionists do not need everything we do to be supergood.

All we want is to see it complete: perfectionism comes from the Latin perficio: to finish, to round off, to persevere until the work is done.

That is why I take so much time writing this history-chapter that I am currently working on. That is why I take an hour publishing a short Historian-at-Large post.

It’s not that it needs to be excellent (‘perfect’ is the confusing term often used).

It’s just that I hate loose

P.S.  Any grammatical or tyoing mistakes discovered in this text can safely be taken to be part of my behaviour therapy.