The Alchemist of Small Things

You see what nobody else sees. The one figure that is wrong, the sentence that undermines the whole paragraph, the fact that someone at the table has gone quiet. Your attention operates at a resolution most people cannot access, and you have spent your life quietly correcting the world before it breaks. Much of what has gone right around you went right because of an adjustment you made and never mentioned.

People love you for the sense that with you involved, things will actually work. You are the reason several things in other people's lives did not fall apart.

The price is that the instrument does not switch off, and its finest resolution is turned on yourself. The same precision that catches the error in the accounts catches every one of your own imperfections, continuously, with no proportion and no mercy — you can hold a real achievement and a small awkwardness from the same day, and only feel the second one. You call it high standards. High standards are applied to work. What you are doing is applied to your existence, and it is a different thing entirely.