I have to be honest: making a documentary was a bad idea.

I should have figured this out long before I did – to be clear, I had never edited a video in my life – but this fact didn’t dawn on me until February 10th, 2025. Four days to the contest deadline, and I wasn’t finished. Sounds like a learning experience? Oh, it was. I learned a lot from making that documentary, but my most important lesson had nothing to do with video editing. It was about perfectionism.

My documentary had seeded itself almost six months earlier, in August. I was starting AP US History with Mrs. Richman, and one of the assignments was creating a project for the National History Day competition. Contest participation was optional, but it sounded fun. Another thing that sounded fun was creating a short documentary on my topic. There were several project type options, including research papers, which I knew a lot about. But those were kind of boring, and anyway, I had written about four major essays the year before. I wanted to do something new, something interesting.

Interesting ended up being an understatement. Between other classwork and the daunting challenge of figuring out how in the world to edit videos, it was easy to put it off for later. ‘Later’ never fully materialized, and this is how we get back to February 10th , when I realized that the whole scheme had been poorly conceived and I probably should have just written a paper.

I couldn’t see a way to get it ready in time. But wait! I was being defeatist, I told myself. Sure, I had procrastinated earlier, but that was no reason to give up now. I decided to see what I could do in the next four days. February 14th revealed a documentary that was at best three-quarters finished, but my bacon was saved when I found out that I could keep editing after the deadline.

Two weeks of incessant editing later, I finished my documentary the night before my regional National History Day competition. My mom commented that the music was a little loud; it was hard to hear what I was saying, she said. I turned the music volume down and decided to call it a night. Maybe it wasn’t perfect, but it was getting late, and we had to drive an hour to the contest the next day.

The competition was a blast. I had no expectation of placing or going to the state competition – it was my first documentary, for crying out loud. I was just happy that I had gotten something decent ready in time. As expected, I did not place. But when I got my official feedback, I was furious. The judges had liked my documentary, they said. It might have placed, if not for one thing: the music was so loud that they had been unable to hear all of what I said.

My anger wasn’t with the judges – I was angry with myself. Something whispered that I had let my standards slip, that one stupid little thing I had been too tired to bother with had messed everything up.

As may be obvious by now, I’m a perfectionist – type A, everything-done-by-the-deadline, etc. Some people obsess over perfection more than others, but everyone (including those who aren’t exactly type A) has something that they will work on until it’s just how they want it. In certain situations, that kind of perfectionism can be a superpower; when it kicks in, we do our best work.

During my junior year, I confronted the problem with perfectionism – that is, when everything has to be perfect, or the standard of perfection is unrealistic, or both. I was taking four classes; two were AP, one was precalculus (not AP; I would have perished if it had been), and one of my AP’s was AP Music Theory. And I was learning theory from rock bottom. To be honest, I was doing fine. My grades were good – and that was largely because I was able to lock in and concentrate on doing my work well. Perfectionism helped me succeed, but perfection became the goal. External standards like grades are important, but I had been too wrapped up in them to notice that my work really was a success.

I’ll be honest here: I didn’t just have this epiphany and never have problems with perfectionism again. A perfect example is this essay. Let’s just say that it was later than it had any business being because I was obsessing over the perfect words to express my ideas. But when this happens now, I can say with confidence that my drive to be perfect is ridiculous and unhelpful sometimes – and that it can be ignored when it throws temper tantrums. Even though I would like to do everything perfectly all the time, I know that it isn’t possible. Now I can (sort of) accept that.

And that brings me to a question. Should I have pushed through on my documentary? Would it have made more sense to quit it and tell the coordinator I wasn’t coming? I honestly don’t know. Somehow, I think it doesn’t matter – to my mind, the most important part of that competition was what I learned afterwards. Apparently, I needed a practical example that perfectionism is useful to a point – but also that perfection isn’t the goal. The pressure to be perfect was beside the point. What matters was what I learned. The learning was the goal.

Tabitha Artinian is an Ohio senior who enjoys reading, writing, hiking, and coding. She’s also an amateur musician and composer and wishes she could rant about her favorite progressive bluegrass bands here.