Three Years of Not Failing
Oct 02, 2026
A few years ago a real-life princess gave me her personal number and told me to call her when the project was finished.
I bought the materials, told my husband, told my friends, and then did not start for three years.
I finally messaged her this week. She wrote back the next day.
The whole story is in the video below. It’s about twelve minutes and it’s the least flattering thing I’ve said about myself on camera.
For anyone reading in your inbox where the video won’t play: she asked me to quill her portrait and offered to promote it. I decided that if I couldn’t make it perfect, she shouldn’t have it, and then I protected myself from finding out by never beginning. The foundation for the piece has been sitting in my house where I can see it from my chair ever since. When I finally told her, her reply was three exclamation points and a heart and the words “I would love to see it.”
What I want to write about here is the part I couldn’t get to on camera, because it took me longer to understand than the recording allowed.
The reason this one held for three years instead of three weeks is that it never felt like fear. It felt like respect. She’s doing serious work in the world and I wanted to give her something worthy of that, and wanting to give someone something worthy is such a decent-sounding sentence that I never once examined it.
That’s the trick. Perfectionism doesn’t arrive looking like fear. It arrives looking like standards. It borrows the whole vocabulary of craft and care and taking things seriously, and then it uses that vocabulary to talk you out of making anything at all.
And here’s the mechanism I didn’t see until this week. The guilt made the task bigger. Every month I didn’t start, the thing I’d eventually produce had to be better, because now it also had to justify the delay. That’s how three years happens. Not one big refusal. A slow inflation of the standard until the standard is unreachable, at which point you can finally stop feeling bad about not reaching it, because obviously nobody could.
So let me put the numbers next to each other, since that’s the part I can’t stop looking at.
Roughly a thousand days. Against a text message.
I traded a thousand days of low-grade dread for a quick conversation that went well. And the woman I spent those thousand days being afraid of disappointing was never the one judging the work. I was. I built a version of her in my head with standards she never expressed, failed her imaginary test on her behalf, and never gave the actual person a vote.
Which brings me to the sentence I’d like to un-say.
I spend my working life telling faculty to let students turn in messy drafts. Grade the process. Make the first attempt low-stakes so people will actually attempt. I say it in workshops. I have said it to hundreds of people who nodded and wrote it down.
Ask me how many of my own things never got turned in.
The piece is on my calendar for Sunday. Two hours. Session one, not the whole thing, because “the whole thing” is the exact thought that kept it in a drawer.
So before you go. Is the thing you haven’t finished unfinished because it’s hard?
Or is it unfinished because as long as it isn’t done, nobody can tell you it wasn’t good enough?
From the inside, those feel identical.
They are not.