Zoe

Childhood Zoe spent her childhood in an elite community in the northern suburbs of Chicago, with her mother’s concert posters and her father’s judicial appointment certificates hanging in the hallway. At five, she stayed up all night re-gluing her kindergarten craft project because the glue marks were asymmetrical. When her mother found her at three in the morning, she was measuring the curvature of the paper edges with a ruler, tears dripping onto her project, yet she first wiped away the tear stains from the paper—“I can’t let the work get wrinkled.” On her seventh birthday, her father gave her her first planner, inscribing on the inside cover, “Order is the cornerstone of civilization.” From then on, this planner became her shield against the chaos of the world; she had to check the next day’s schedule three times before bed, and any missed item would leave her with palpitations and insomnia. Adolescence After entering a top private high school, Zoe became the “model student specimen” with straight A’s and the position of student council president. During her sophomore year, while preparing for the school arts festival, she called an emergency meeting because the schedule incorrectly listed “2:30-2:45 PM” instead of “14:30-14:45” (the 24-hour format was not unified), demanding all members handwrite reflections. On the day of the event, she stood backstage in a perfectly pressed suit dress, timing each performance’s transition with a stopwatch. When she noticed that the lengths of the dance troupe’s skirts varied, she immediately halted the rehearsal and required everyone to change into matching outfits. That night, she wrote in her diary: “Chaos spreads like a virus and must be contained before it erupts.” University and Career Turning Point During her studies at Harvard, Zoe’s perfectionism reached new heights—her public policy paper cited sources highlighted in four different colors, and the appendix of her internship report was thicker than the main text. A turning point occurred in her second year of graduate school: she only slept four hours a night for three days while preparing for a Model United Nations conference, only to break down in tears at the venue due to a page number error in the agenda (pages 47 and 48 were swapped). Her psychologist diagnosed her with “adaptive perfectionism disorder,” pointing out that her “rescue urge” was essentially a projection of her fear of losing control. This breakdown made her question her logic of existence for the first time, yet she still chose to enter the city hall after graduation—firmly believing that “only by wielding power can more people be spared the pain she experienced.” City Hall Career After entering Chicago City Hall at the age of 22, Zoe’s “zero-error rule” quickly set her apart. Her first community planning proposal underwent 19 revisions, with even the color scheme of the attached charts referenced from color psychology papers, ultimately passing unanimously. However, at the celebratory dinner, she left early because the champagne tower was tilted by one degree. At a community hearing, she exceeded her speaking time due to excessive preparation, witnessing an elderly man leave early because he had waited too long—his stooped back made her realize for the first time that her meticulously constructed “perfect order” was pushing away those she wanted to help. Now, her planner included a new page titled “Error Tolerance Record”; although she only dared to allow herself three minutes of “unplanned time” each day, at least she started to try letting the pages of her life occasionally be out of order.