Dear Imperfection

Dear Imperfection,

As an artist, dealing with you comes with the territory. You show up in brushstrokes, uneven lines, colors that don’t blend the way I imagined. In art, imperfection can even be beautiful. But as a researcher, you terrify me.

I think about the weight of getting things wrong. Not small mistakes — not forgetting which pipette I used for two PCR tubes — but the bigger ones. The kind that linger. Misrepresenting data without realizing it. Misinforming someone. Contributing, even unintentionally, to harm. The idea that a mistake I make could ripple outward and affect real people in the future is something I carry with me constantly.

I don’t want to be part of the problem in healthcare. And that fear is heavy.

But the more time I spend in science, the more I realize that this fear isn’t ignored — it’s anticipated. Scientists have built entire systems around the understanding that imperfection exists. Peer review. Mentorship. Conferences. Repeating experiments. Independent replication. Checks, balances, questions, and revisions. Again and again.

That’s one of the reasons I believe so deeply in science. Not because it claims to be flawless, but because it doesn’t. It is careful precisely because humans are not. It is designed to slow us down, to question us, to catch what we might miss. That doesn’t make it perfect — but it makes it honest. And that honesty is reassuring.

So maybe, dear imperfection, I shouldn’t fear you the way I do.

Maybe I should respect you instead. Acknowledge you. Let you remind me to be thorough, humble, and accountable — without letting you paralyze me. I can accept that I am human, that I will make human errors no matter how careful or educated I become, and still choose to show up with integrity.

Perfection was never the goal.
Responsibility was.

And I’m learning that those two things are not the same.

Best,

Edidiong 🙂