the sun was just starting to come up over the river and I was still at my desk not really working you know just… moving things. files. blueprints for that big sustainable housing project, the one that could really… well, it could have been something, something to be proud of. but instead I was just… organizing. for hours. sub-folders within sub-folders. naming conventions. re-naming, deleting, then re-making them because they weren't quite right, not perfect. the system. my system. like it was a grand architectural feat itself, this digital filing structure, more important than the actual buildings, than the people who would live in them. it’s a form of maladaptive perfectionism, I suppose, a kind of displacement activity. a way to feel in control when everything else feels like it’s slipping, like the whole city is just moving too fast and you're constantly trying to catch your breath. and I remember thinking, this is exactly what happened with the symphony hall redesign, all those years ago. spent three weeks meticulously categorizing every single material sample, every shade of acoustical paneling, instead of actually finalising the soundproofing schematics. and then the deadline hit, a brutal compression of time and expectation. always the same pattern, this ritual of elaborate evasion. my therapist, Dr. Evans, used to say it was a defense mechanism, a way of warding off the perceived failure of the grand design by getting lost in the minute details. a kind of cognitive dissonance, really, where the urgent is replaced by the merely important-seeming. and it's just so exhausting, the mental energy expended on the illusion of productivity. the coffee went cold hours ago. my phone buzzed with an email from the lead architect, probably asking for an update, and I just… minimized the window. pretended it didn't exist. because if I just keep moving these files around, rearranging the digital furniture, then I don’t have to face the blank spaces, the parts that aren't finished, the parts I don’t quite know how to build yet. the parts that scare me. and now it’s nearly 8 AM, the city waking up around me, and I’m still here, still at the starting line, with nothing but a perfectly ordered set of empty folders. a kind of tragicomic irony, isn't it?