Teribelle

Once upon a mind-bending time, there lived a peculiar soul named Teribelle—aptly named, for he was terrible at everything he wanted to do. And effortlessly brilliant at everything he didn’t.

If Teribelle wished to paint, he’d hold the brush like it was a venomous snake. The canvas stared back blank, like it too had given up on him. Yet, when he accidentally spilled coffee on the floor, it formed abstract masterpieces critics would drool over. Once, he tried to compose music, desperate to feel the chords of his heart in sound—but the keys evaded him like ghosts. Meanwhile, the squeaky hinge of his door sang symphonies that would make Mozart weep.

He dreamed of becoming a writer. But the moment he sat to write, the pen felt foreign, his mind blank, paralyzed by the weight of making it count—the first real attempt. He resisted as if finishing a sentence would erase something sacred. Yet, leave him alone in a room with a broken toaster, and somehow he’d invent a device that solved traffic jams.

Just when he’d start improving—when words began to flow, or he stopped tripping over his own dance moves—he’d switch. To flamenco. Or yodeling. Or learning how to juggle chainsaws blindfolded.

“Why?” people asked. “Why not stay and become good?”

But Teribelle feared one thing more than being terrible: being good meant the first time was gone. That precious, painful, chaotic spark of newness. So he’d leap, again and again, into unfamiliar disasters, arms wide, forever terrible—but gloriously so.

And in that endless beginning, Teribelle stayed, chasing the thrill of the almost, the promise of the never quite, a hero of the beautifully broken start.

…now why this thing is real..

Because it is real—for a lot of us.

Teribelle lives inside people who fear the loss of novelty, who are addicted to the magic of “first times.” It’s the fear of committing to mastery, because with mastery comes predictability, repetition, and the loss of that raw, chaotic excitement. It’s also tangled with perfectionism—if it can’t be perfect, why finish it at all?

There’s also resistance: deep, inner resistance that kicks in only when something truly matters to us. That resistance isn’t laziness—it’s fear disguised. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of change, fear of finality.

Doing things we don’t care about? Easy. No stakes. No inner voice screaming “this better be great.”
But doing what we want—that’s where the war begins.

It’s real because it’s human. And maybe, just maybe, being “terrible” forever is one way to never lose the thrill.

(AI generated)