What My Broken Pen Taught Me About Perfection

What My Broken Pen Taught Me About Perfection

by [Hazrat Ali]

I used to believe that perfection was the goal.

Crisp white pages, unmarred by smudges. Perfect lines. Perfect words. Sentences that landed like feathers and struck like lightning. I imagined that when I wrote, the world would pause—awed by the clarity of my expression, the elegance of my craft. I was in love with the idea of being flawless.

Then my pen broke.

It wasn’t a dramatic break. No explosion of ink, no dramatic shattering of plastic. Just a quiet click one morning—barely a sound—and the smooth glide of ink that I had taken for granted was gone. The pen skipped and scratched, stumbling through my thoughts like a nervous student on a stage. I clicked it again, shook it, scribbled in the margins of my notebook to revive it.

Nothing.

For a long moment, I just stared at the pen. It was one I had used for months—sleek, matte black, comfortable in my hand like a trusted friend. I’d written poems with it. Journal entries. Letters I never sent. I even remembered the first time it had helped me break through a writing block that had held me hostage for weeks.

Now, it refused to cooperate.

I tossed it aside with an annoyed sigh and reached for another. But even as the fresh pen glided across the page, something had shifted. I couldn’t focus. My thoughts, which had just been forming into sentences, crumbled like dried leaves. And that’s when I realized something strange.

I missed the broken pen.

It sounds absurd, right? To miss a faulty instrument. But that pen wasn’t just a tool—it had become a mirror.

For years, I equated my creative process with control. Every sentence needed to be refined, polished, airtight. I deleted paragraphs that weren’t “good enough.” I rewrote poems a dozen times until they sounded mechanical, lifeless. My notebooks were often half-filled, not because I ran out of ideas, but because I didn’t want to ruin a beautiful page with something "unworthy."

I was obsessed with perfection—but not in the way perfectionists often boast about it. Mine wasn’t prideful; it was paralyzing. It whispered that messy beginnings meant failure. That sloppy drafts reflected my value. That unless it was beautiful, it wasn’t worth doing.

But that broken pen—skipping, scratching, faltering—reminded me of something I had forgotten:

Imperfection is where creativity lives.

The next day, I picked it up again. It still didn’t work smoothly. The ink sputtered in bursts, refusing to draw clean lines. But instead of giving up on it, I kept going. I filled a page with its brokenness. The words came in waves—some sharp, some shaky, some smudged—but they came.

There was something poetic in watching those imperfect words appear. They weren’t graceful. They didn’t sparkle. But they were raw. Honest. Human.

I began to notice how the broken pen forced me to slow down. To think about every word. To sit with the silence between lines instead of rushing to fill it. And when I made mistakes, I didn’t tear out the page. I kept writing.

In that slowness, I found something I had long buried under my obsession with polish: joy.

Life, I’ve realized, is a bit like that pen.

We expect everything to flow—to be neat and uninterrupted. We plan, we organize, we visualize our path like a perfect page waiting to be written. But then something breaks: a relationship, a dream, a belief we once held tightly.

And when it does, we try to replace it quickly. To cover the gap. To move on. We forget that maybe—just maybe—the crack has something to teach us.

A broken pen taught me that art doesn’t need to be flawless to be meaningful. A shaky poem can still move a heart. An unfinished journal can still hold sacred truths. A page filled with crossed-out thoughts is not a failure—it’s a sign of attempt, of existence, of effort.

In Japanese culture, there’s an art called Kintsugi—repairing broken pottery with gold, so the cracks become part of the beauty. I like to think that writing with a broken pen is a kind of Kintsugi for the soul. The flaws are what make the piece shine.

I still have that pen. I never threw it away.

It sits in a cup on my desk beside newer, smoother, shinier ones. But every now and then, when the pressure of "getting it right" creeps back in, I reach for it. I let it scratch and skip. I let it remind me that beauty doesn’t live in the perfect—it lives in the effort, the truth, and the courage to keep going even when the lines aren’t clean.

Perfection was never the goal. Presence was. Expression was. Honesty was.

My broken pen couldn’t give me perfect words. But it gave me something better:

Permission to be imperfect.

And with that, I became free.