I’m not perfect since birth.

The crazed for perfection didn’t start since the beginning beginning. But it was somewhere close. Maybe when my Gran compared my existence to an ugly thorn. Actually, perhaps a little further, when I was eight, and the kids at school gossiped how dirty, grimy, poor-looking was I, how I was always the centre of humiliation because I’ve speech impediments and walked, like how they phrased it, “gayly”.

People look at me with pity, or sometimes stigma. I think I developed OCD then—from the fear of being a laughstock.

Funny. I continued to be a joke. And yet the disorder refused to go away.