Simply put – my imperfections make me perfect.
Why oh why do we strive for perfection? What is it in our DNA that tells us that we have to be perfect? The answer to that question is nothing. There is nothing telling us that we have to be perfect but us. So then the next question will be…..why do we do that to ourselves? There is defiantly more than one answer to that question. So let’s spend some time on this subject and see where we land.
As always we need to start with our childhood.
We are all born perfect. Just these little balls of perfection. There is not one baby that is better than another. It’s what happens after you are born that things start to go downhill. When we start to develop and begin the journey of figuring out exactly who we are, we are molded into what society thinks we should be. I understand the whole shaping the young child into becoming an upstanding adult. But I also think there has to be a learning curve that goes only with this. Otherwise you end up with a child who feels one way and is being told that way is wrong. Not only that their way is wrong but they themselves are wrong and therefore imperfect. We start the whole “gotta be perfect” journey very young.
From childhood we go into adulthood. There are a whole new batch of problems there. You have the whole “why are you not married?”, “why did you have a child so young?” even “why don’t you have children?”. You stay in a marriage for this kids, you should have left. You leave your spouse and you are selfish. It just never stops. No matter what you do you are not doing what someone is doing and therefore that makes you wrong AKA imperfect. It is a never ending fucking circle, until you decide to put an end it.
But how?? How do you put the brakes on something that is so embedded into how we are raised and who we have become? For me, I had to get rid of any idea of perfection. I was so far from perfect that I might of well of said that I wanted to be first person to step on Mars. It was not going to happen.
So I decided to look inward and see what was really imperfection and what was really me. I had to separate the two. When I looked inward I found a scared, lonely little girl who was killing herself slowly with alcohol. Again, not my idea of perfection but that wasn’t my idea of who I wanted to be either. So I started out on a journey to find the real me. I knew she was in there somewhere, I just had to give myself a safe spot to find her. I felt like I was trying to get the scraggly stray dog to finally trust me enough to get help. So I put out bread crumbs to lure myself out of the cycle I was in. Every time I took a chance and let my wall down a little, I would reward myself. Bread crumb, wall down, reward. I started to not need the crumbs, I just started tearing down the wall. Finally, the walls were down and I stood there, reborn and I found out that I was actually a pretty could person. Totally imperfect and perfect all at the same time.
I took this new sense of understanding of myself and ran with it. I was that scraggly stray dog that finally got to run free in a meadow without a care in the world. It was like taking the blindfold off and seeing myself for who I truly am for the first time. I found out that I’m weird, I’m funny, I’m passionate about life I’m everything that I am supposed to be. Now trust me, there are things that I could work on if I wanted to and there are things I could change about myself if I wanted to. Maybe one day I will work on some things and maybe one day I’ll change something about myself – but not today. Today I’m going to embrace me for me.
I look back at my life and scratch my head at why I didn’t see this sooner but that’s another story for another day. All I will say now is that it makes perfect sense how I become an addict. You can only life a life of disappointment for so long before you start to medicate yourself. It’s much easier to dull the pain instead of addressing it. I had to finally get the balls to that. I had to plug my nose and take the plunge into years of paid in order to get to the other side. And here is the craziest part of it all – it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. All those years of being scared to address my past turned into something that I was able to do without too much damage. We build so much in our minds that when it when it actually do what we are scared of we feel rather silly for being so scared of it in the first place. We really are strange.
My embracing my imperfections was just one of many things I had to do in order to live a healthy life. I don’t often call it a sober life because sober sounds so square. So ridged. I personally prefer to call it a healthy life. To me this sounds fresh and full of life. So anyway back to the subject, I knew there were things in my past that I felt made me imperfect so I developed a very strong meditation practice and was able to go back and address those issues. This gave me a safe space (my head) to explore the issues in my past. It was during those journeys that I figured out that there was really anything stopping me from feeling imperfect but me.
So I’m ending this with a couple of thoughts:
- You are perfect just the way you are.
- You hold the key to happiness, you just have to use it.
- Don’t be scared your past, it can no longer hurt you.
- You have a voice – use it.
Please feel free to leave your thoughts. Like I said you have a voice and a safe space to use it here.
Until tomorrow…….