The Yew Has Wilted, and I Can't Water It

It's 05:00 as of writing. I've been awake since 01:30, which means I've had roughly three hours of sleep, and I can feel every single one of those missing hours like a physical weight pressing against my skull. The nausea comes in waves – not from illness, but from stress, from anxiety, from the gnawing fear that I'm doing everything wrong and there's nothing I can do to fix it.

The yew has wilted, and I can't water it.

That's the metaphor that's been circling my brain for the past few hours, persistent and unwelcome. Yews are hardy trees – ancient, resilient, capable of living for thousands of years. They're associated with death and rebirth, with transformation and endurance. My name, Eòghann, means "born of yew." It's meant to signify strength, longevity, something enduring.

Except right now, the yew is wilting. And I know exactly what it needs – water, care, attention – but I can't make myself provide it. Not because I don't want to. Not because I don't care. But because I'm paralysed by the fear that I'll water it wrong, that I'll use the wrong amount, that I'll damage it further by trying to help.

This is what perfectionism does. It doesn't make you better. It makes you unable to act at all.

The Weight of Kakorrhaphiophobia

There's a word for the fear of failure: kakorrhaphiophobia. It's a delightfully Greek term for an exhaustingly familiar feeling – the persistent, overwhelming dread that you're going to fail, that everything you do will turn out wrong, that your best efforts will amount to nothing but embarrassment and disappointment.

I have kakorrhaphiophobia. Probably always have, though I only recently learned the name for it. And it's not just about big failures, the kind that everyone fears – losing a job, failing an exam, public humiliation. It's about the small failures too. The tiny mistakes. The imperfections that most people wouldn't even notice but that, to me, feel like proof that I'm fundamentally inadequate.

Did I phrase that message correctly? Did I format that code properly? Is this blog post structured well enough? Am I presenting myself in a way that people will respect, or am I just embarrassing myself by trying?

These questions never stop. They're background radiation, constant and corrosive, wearing away at my ability to just... do things. To create, to share, to exist in public spaces without second-guessing every single decision.

The worst part? Perfectionism disguises itself as a virtue. "I just have high standards," we tell ourselves. "I care about doing things well." And that's true, to a point. But there's a line between healthy standards and pathological perfectionism, and I crossed that line so long ago that I can barely remember what it looked like from the other side.

Sisyphean Spirals

The Greek myths have always resonated with me – probably because they're full of people dealing with impossible situations and divine capriciousness, which feels depressingly relatable. But Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down, forever repeating the same futile task – that's the one that hits different lately.

Every day feels Sisyphean. I wake up (when I manage to sleep at all), and the boulder is waiting. Tasks that should be simple – writing a blog post, sending an email, making a cup of tea – become monumental because I need them to be perfect. And nothing is ever perfect, so I push the boulder up the hill, watch it roll back down, and start again tomorrow.

Or I don't start at all, because what's the point? The boulder will roll back down anyway. Better to not try than to try and fail, right? Except that's not actually better. That's just another form of failure, one that comes with the added bonus of self-recrimination for not even attempting the thing.

The spiral works like this: I want to do something. I become anxious about doing it wrong. The anxiety makes me procrastinate. The procrastination makes me more anxious. Eventually, either I force myself to do it whilst consumed with dread, or I give up entirely and feel terrible about giving up. Neither outcome is particularly pleasant.

And lately, the spirals have intensified. It's not just about work or creative projects anymore – though those remain reliably anxiety-inducing. It's spread to everything, including the things that are supposed to help.

When Even Offerings Feel Impossible

I've been wanting to make an offering to Selene . Just something simple – a cup of tea, left out under the moon with intention and respect. It's not complicated. It's not some elaborate ritual requiring rare ingredients or specialised knowledge. It's just tea.

Except I can't do it.

Because what if I do it wrong? What if using a standard cup of tea is disrespectful? What if Selene expects something more elaborate, more meaningful, more perfect? What if I'm committing some accidental blasphemy by offering something so mundane? And then there's the practical anxiety layered on top: what do I even do with the tea afterwards? Do I pour it out somewhere specific? Can I drink it myself, or is that somehow disrespectful? Am I supposed to just... waste a perfectly good cup of tea? Because that feels wrong too, and now I'm paralysed by competing anxieties about both respect and wastefulness.

The rational part of my brain knows this is absurd. Selene is the Titaness of the moon, daughter of Hyperion and Theia , sister to Helios and Eos . She's ancient and vast and probably not particularly concerned with the precise specifications of a cup of tea offered by one anxious twenty-year-old in England. The offering is about intention, about connection, about making space for the sacred in everyday life.

But the perfectionist part of my brain – the part that's currently winning – insists that if I can't do it perfectly, I shouldn't do it at all. That a flawed offering is worse than no offering. That I'll somehow damage my relationship with the divine by being inadequate.

This is what I mean about the yew wilting. I know it needs water – I know I need connection, ritual, practices that ground me and give me meaning. But I'm so terrified of watering it wrong that I'm letting it die instead.

The Technical Perfectionism (Or: 1049 Commits of Architectural Anxiety)

Here's the odd thing: I'm actually fairly decent at just pushing code. My website is live, built entirely on AT Protocol, and it works. I don't sit on uncommitted changes for weeks, paralysed by indecision. I implement features, I deploy them, I move on.

But that's not because I've overcome perfectionism in that domain. It's because I've redirected it.

The numbers tell the story: 1049 git commits across three years. Ten different versions, each with fundamentally different architectures. My current iteration – version ten – took me a week to build the initial version. One week to completely restructure how the entire site works. Again.

That's not productivity. That's compulsion.

Each architectural revision is born from the same fear: this current version isn't good enough. It's messy. It's inefficient. Future me will look at this code and wonder what the hell present me was thinking. So better to tear it all down and rebuild it properly this time. Surely this time I'll get the architecture right. This time it'll be clean enough, elegant enough, maintainable enough.

Except it never is. Because six months later, I'll see a better way to structure the caching layer, or a more elegant approach to handling AT Protocol agents, or a cleaner pattern for managing state. And the cycle begins again. Version eleven is already forming in the back of my mind, lurking there like an accusation that version ten is already inadequate.

The fear isn't about implementing features incorrectly anymore. I've accepted that my code is, objectively, a bit shit. There will be bugs. There will be technical debt. There will be that one function I wrote at 02:00 that makes me wince every time I look at it. I know this. I've made peace with it (mostly).

What I haven't made peace with is what comes after. The inevitable future where I'll need to fix some obscure bug in code I barely remember writing. The certainty that at some point, something will break in a way I didn't anticipate, and I'll need to wade back through my own messy implementation to figure out what went wrong. And I'll curse past me for making the architectural decisions that led to this moment.

Past me has been cursed a lot. I've cursed past me across ten architectural revisions, across 1049 commits, across three years of constant rebuilding. And present me knows, with absolute certainty, that future me will curse present me just as thoroughly. It's already happening – I can feel the dissatisfaction with version ten creeping in, the awareness of decisions I'm making now that will cause problems later.

It's not the fear of doing it badly that paralyses me with code – it's the fear of future me having to deal with the consequences of present me doing it badly. Which is, in its own way, still perfectionism. Just projected forward in time and backwards in git history.

The yew might be watered incorrectly now, but future me will have to deal with the results of that incorrect watering, and I'm pre-emptively exhausted on their behalf.

This anxiety about future consequences extends to everything. Not just code, but conversations (will I regret saying that in a week?), blog posts (will I cringe at this phrasing in a month?), decisions (will this choice seem idiotic in a year?). I'm not just afraid of present failure – I'm afraid of future failure that stems from present imperfection.

Which means I'm essentially living in three states of anxiety simultaneously: anxiety about what I'm doing now, anxiety about what I'll need to fix later, and anxiety about how I'll feel about all of it in retrospect. Plus the weight of looking back at all those previous versions, all those abandoned architectures, wondering if any of them were actually better than what I have now.

No wonder I can't sleep.

The Trinity of Temporal Fears

There's another layer to this, one that makes the perfectionism more urgent and more desperate: I'm terrified of time. Or more specifically, I'm terrified of three things that time inevitably brings.

Thanatophobia: fear of death. Gerascophobia: fear of aging. Athazagoraphobia: fear of being forgotten.

These three fears work together in a particularly unpleasant way. I'm afraid of dying, which makes me afraid of aging (because aging brings me closer to death), which makes me desperate to leave something behind so I won't be forgotten. And that desperation feeds directly into the perfectionism, because if I'm going to be remembered, it had better be for something good, something meaningful, something that justifies my existence.

Except nothing I create ever feels good enough to justify remembering. Every blog post could be better. Every project could be more polished. Every architectural version could be more elegant. I'm racing against time – against aging, against death, against the inevitable erosion of memory – whilst simultaneously paralysing myself with the need for everything to be perfect.

And what will I leave behind? 1049 commits documenting three years of constant dissatisfaction with my own work? Ten architectural versions, each one a monument to the inadequacy of the previous one? A git history that reads like an archaeological record of perfectionism eating itself?

The yew is wilting, and I'm so busy obsessing over the correct watering technique that I'm forgetting that time is passing. That the tree won't live forever. That neither will I.

This is the particular hell of perfectionism combined with existential dread: you're simultaneously aware that time is limited and unable to act because nothing you do feels sufficient to justify the time you're using. I've spent three years rebuilding my website. Three years. How much of my finite lifespan have I spent being dissatisfied with previous versions of something that mostly worked?

And then the code anxiety loops back in: even if I create something now, future me will discover it's flawed, and then what was the point? If the things I make to be remembered by are themselves imperfect – if they're just version ten in an endless series of increasingly desperate revisions – does that mean I've failed at the only thing that matters?

(The rational answer is no, obviously. The anxiety doesn't care about rational answers.)

What This Actually Looks Like

Let me be concrete about what this feels like, because abstract discussion of fear and perfectionism can make it sound more philosophical than it is. This is visceral and exhausting and sometimes physically painful.

It's 03:00, and I'm lying in bed, wide awake, my mind racing through every mistake I made today and every potential mistake I might make tomorrow. My stomach is churning with nausea – not from food, not from illness (surprisingly), but from pure anxiety. I need to sleep. I know I need to sleep. But I can't turn my brain off because it's too busy cataloguing failures and pre-emptively panicking about future failures at a million miles per hour.

It's looking at a blank page and feeling physically incapable of typing the first word because what if it's the wrong word? What if the whole piece is structured incorrectly from the start? Better to stare at the blank page for another hour, just to be sure.

It's having a cup of tea go cold because I spent twenty minutes trying to decide if offering it to Selene would be appropriate, then another ten minutes trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do with it afterwards, and by the time I'd cycled through all the possible ways to get it wrong, the moment had passed and I'd failed again.

It's opening my website repository and seeing the commit history stretching back three years, seeing all those previous versions I thought were good enough at the time, and feeling sick with the knowledge that present me already thinks version ten is inadequate. It's knowing that in six months, I'll be planning version eleven. That this will never end. That I'll be rebuilding this site until I die, chasing an architectural perfection that doesn't exist.

It's watching my friends create things – art, music, writing, code – and feeling simultaneously inspired and devastated because they just... do it. They make things. They share things. They don't seem to be paralysed by the fear that everything they create is inadequate, or that they'll hate it in six months, or that they'll spend three years in an endless cycle of rebuilding the same thing over and over.

(They probably are afraid sometimes. Everyone is. But from the outside, it looks like they're not, and that comparison is poison.)

It's the physical exhaustion that comes from being constantly tense, constantly vigilant, constantly monitoring myself for potential failures. My shoulders hurt. My jaw aches from clenching. I have stress headaches that feel like someone's slowly tightening a band around my skull.

And it's the isolation that comes from perfectionism making social interaction feel impossible. Because conversations can go wrong. I might say the wrong thing, might come across as stupid or pretentious or just... wrong. So it's easier to not engage at all, which means I'm lonely, which makes everything worse.

The yew is wilting, and I'm too exhausted from worrying about it to actually do anything to help.

The Impossible Standards

Here's something I've noticed: my standards for myself are completely divorced from my standards for other people. When a friend shares something they've created, I think it's wonderful. I appreciate the effort, the creativity, the courage it took to make something and put it out into the world. I don't scrutinise it for flaws. I don't demand perfection. I'm just glad they made it.

But when it comes to my own work? Nothing is ever good enough. That blog post I spent three weeks writing? My poetry? Mediocre at best. The website I built from scratch using AT Protocol? It works, sure, but it's full of questionable decisions that future me will curse present me for. Version ten is already looking dated and I only finished it a few months ago. The code I wrote that actually solves the problem? Functional, yes, but imagine having to debug that in six months. Embarrassing. Version eleven is already necessary, obviously.

I would never judge someone else this harshly. I'd be appalled if someone else judged their own work this way. But somehow, I've convinced myself that I'm the exception – that while everyone else deserves compassion and understanding, I need to meet impossible standards or I'm worthless.

This is irrational. I know it's irrational. But knowing something is irrational doesn't make it stop.

The perfectionism isn't really about quality, I think. It's about control. If I can make everything perfect, then I can't be criticised. If I can anticipate every potential failure – including the ones that haven't happened yet – I can avoid them. If I can meet impossible standards, I can prove that I'm worthy of existing, of taking up space, of being remembered after I'm gone.

Except I can't make everything perfect. I can't anticipate every failure. I can't meet impossible standards because they're impossible. And every time I fail to meet them – which is every single time, across ten architectural versions and 1049 commits – it reinforces the belief that I'm fundamentally inadequate.

I don't even know what lies beyond it all.

The yew is wilting because I've set standards for proper watering that no tree could ever meet.

Where This Leaves Me

It's after 05:00 now. The sun will be up soon. I haven't slept. My eyes are gritty with exhaustion, my stomach is still churning with nausea, and I'm no closer to resolving any of this than I was three and a half hours ago.

The yew is still wilting. I still haven't watered it. I'm still paralysed by the fear of doing it wrong.

But here's the thing: I'm writing this. This blog post, this admission of struggle and imperfection and fear – I'm doing it. It's not perfect. It's probably too personal, too raw, too much of an overshare. The structure could be tighter. The metaphors could be more elegant. Someone will inevitably point out something I got wrong. And in six months, I'll probably read it back and cringe at half the phrasing.

And I'm doing it anyway.

Because the alternative – letting the yew die because I'm too afraid to water it – is worse than any imperfect attempt at care. The boulder will roll back down the hill, yes, but maybe the point isn't reaching the top. Maybe the point is pushing it anyway, because the pushing matters even if the destination is impossible.

Maybe version ten doesn't need to be perfect. Maybe it just needs to exist. Maybe 1049 commits isn't evidence of failure – maybe it's evidence of persistence, of showing up, of trying again even when the previous version wasn't good enough. Maybe the problem isn't that I keep rebuilding; maybe the problem is that I think I shouldn't have to.

I still don't know if offering Selene a cup of tea is appropriate. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it afterwards. I don't know if I'm allowed to drink it myself once the offering period is over (is there an offering period? How long? Who decides these things?). I don't know if pouring it out would be wasteful, or if keeping it would be disrespectful.

But you know what? I'm going to do it anyway. Not because I've suddenly become confident in my understanding of proper ritual practice, but because the intention matters more than the execution. She's the Titaness of the moon, vast and ancient and probably quite capable of understanding that a fumbling attempt at connection is more meaningful than perfect silence.

And if I get it wrong – which I probably will – then I'll have got it wrong whilst trying, which is better than getting it wrong by not trying at all.

The fears are still there – thanatophobia, gerascophobia, athazagoraphobia. The fear of death, of aging, of being forgotten. Kakorrhaphiophobia, the fear of failure. The fear of future me having to fix the mistakes present me is making right now. The certainty that version eleven is already forming in the back of my mind, waiting to prove that version ten wasn't good enough. These aren't going to disappear because I wrote a blog post about them. They'll be waiting tomorrow, and the day after, and probably for the rest of my life.

But maybe the yew doesn't need perfect watering. Maybe it just needs water, imperfect and inconsistent and sometimes delivered with shaking hands and uncertainty about whether I'm doing it right. Maybe growth doesn't require perfection. Maybe survival is about doing the thing despite the fear, not because the fear has gone away.

Maybe architectural revision is just part of the process. Maybe those 1049 commits aren't a monument to failure – maybe they're a record of learning, of growing, of refusing to give up even when every version feels inadequate. Maybe version ten is allowed to be imperfect. Maybe version eleven can wait.

I'm still terrified. I'm still exhausted. I'm still nauseous and anxious and convinced that everything I do is wrong, or will turn out to be wrong in retrospect, or will create problems for future me to deal with.

But the yew has wilted, and I can't water it perfectly, so I'm going to water it badly. Because bad water is better than no water at all. Because a slightly incorrect offering is better than no offering. Because version ten, with all its flaws and questionable decisions, is better than no website at all. Because imperfect code that works is better than perfect code that never gets written.

And maybe tomorrow, when the boulder rolls back down the hill, I'll push it again. Not because I think I'll reach the top this time, but because pushing matters. Because trying matters. Because the alternative is standing still whilst everything withers, and I'm tired of watching things die because I was too afraid to help.

Eos is saying hello. I should try to sleep, though I probably won't manage it. But first, I'm going to make a cup of tea. One for me, and one for Selene. It won't be perfect. It'll probably be wrong in ways I don't even understand yet. I still don't know what to do with it afterwards. I'll figure that bit out when I get there.

And maybe later today, I'll push commit 1050. It won't be perfect either. It'll add to a codebase that future me will probably curse. But it'll be something. And something is better than nothing.

The yew has wilted. I'm going to water it anyway.