What If… Stella Writes

I am late to almost everything.

I was not late to my birth – a speedy half-hour labour, I’m told – but it’s been pretty much all downhill since then. Thank god my teachers didn’t accurately report my truancy because I would have been in detention almost every day during my final year of high school. I used to have this recurring dream that my parents would just drive off without me because I took too long to get ready.

It’s not that I’m lazy (I hope). In fact, it’s often the opposite: I’m a perfectionist, so I’ve got to work through things really, really slowly. That way I can tweak tiny details and fixate on mistakes and luxuriate in all the ways I could make it better. Is this a good work ethic? Hum, hmmm, let me get back to you on that.

It has taken me between five and fifteen months to write this article, depending on how you look at it. Let me lay out the timeline for you:

1. In February 2024, I handed in my extended writing project for my Master of Writing.
2. About two months later, I received my grade and met with my lecturers to discuss how I might continue my writing career in the great wide world.
3. In August 2024, I made a WordPress account.
4. Three months later, I made use of the Cyber Monday discount and bought this custom domain.
5. In April 2025, I attended my graduation ceremony – over a year after finishing my degree.
6. One month later, I made a new document titled “Website Posts” and started drafting this piece.

I know!! What the hell is that?? Who thought it would be smart to let a perfectly good website domain sit dormant in the depths of the internet for five months?? I’m starting to think the saying “good things take time” doesn’t account for the people who are deathly afraid of failure.

At the risk of sounding like a melodramatic *artiste* who can’t take an ounce of criticism, there is a deeply rooted fear in me that my work will be judged and found wanting. When I was younger, I was known as the “what if” kid – what if the sky suddenly turned green? What if everyone could fly? Over time, these “what ifs” became a lot less whimsical and a lot more evil. What if I can’t do it? What if I get a bad grade? What if my writing is boring or stupid? What if it’s just fine, nothing special, the same as every other blog out there? What if someone finds a typo???

It’s laughable when the stakes are this low. What’s actually going to happen? No one reads the posts on my silly little website? Well no one’s reading them when the whole damn thing doesn’t exist yet!!! 

And logically I know all that – you won’t get anywhere by simply hoping for it. There has to be some action involved, some purpose; there’s no chance of success if you don’t take the risk. Oh but my darling what if you fly and all that. But sometimes it’s hard to shake that little nagging voice that says… wouldn’t it be better if everything stayed pristine, perfect, blank, empty? Do you really want to mar that clean page with your scribbles??

Of course, perfection doesn’t exist, and if it did? I think it would be really boring! Yes this piece of art is objectively fantastic and nobody can find fault with it and we all have the exact same opinion on it 🙂… uh, gross! What if we need nuanced, imperfect art so we can share our responses to it and engage in discussion and influence each other’s opinions? What if we need to make flawed work and receive feedback on it in order to learn and improve in our own creative practices?? WHAT THEN, HUH BRAIN???

I’ve reached a certain point of creative frustration with this damn website where I just decided to do it. Write this stupid, imperfect article and be done with it! Sure, I didn’t plan on my first post being a slightly cringe meta rant/diary overshare/analysis of art itself, but truthfully I hadn’t pictured what it would be beyond something supposedly “perfect”. It was perfect because it didn’t exist yet, and I could still imagine it as some abstract piece of writing that was somehow witty, thoughtful, humorous, and life-changing (obviously). Was it ever going to be all of those things? Of course not! But a girl can dream, and she did – for far too long.

But finally, here it is: my first ever post on my brand new, five-month-old website. I’m under no pretense that it will break the internet or win some prestigious literary award. I wrote this for a functional purpose, in the hope that it will get me over the mental hurdle of putting my writing out there. Once the website is live and the work is posted? All that’s left is to do it all over again.