In Praise of Imperfection

I'd like to take this moment to thank my imperfections for making me who I am today.  I invite you to do the same.  If you had no imperfections, would you even recognize yourself walking down the street?  If you could do everything perfectly, wouldn't you need to live in your own little bubble of fairy tale perfectionlandia?  If nothing else, the government would probably keep you in a lab studied by Doctors of Perfectness.  (And we've all seen *those* movies and Netflix series.  They never end well.  (Unless burning down a government complex and walking into Rolling Stone's office with an orange and an awesome story = a good ending.  But I digress.))

We are all imperfect.  Everyone struggles with different lessons and challenges.  

Now stop rolling your eyes; I mean it!  Even the person you've watched from afar - the one with all the qualities you admire and more grace and charisma than you can shake a stick at, that person who seems to have it all together - even they have imperfections, things that in their own mind make them completely unacceptable.  You don't see them, but they exist, bugging the heck out of that seemingly perfect person.  (I enjoyed the billboard that showed a handsome model with the caption, "Somewhere someone is tired of putting up with his crap."  Exactly!)

In school, homework was easy for me - 100% without breaking out the brain cells.  My reading level was at least six grades above my class, consistently, which kept me way ahead of everyone else.  Then I transferred to a bigger school, and suddenly it wasn't as easy.  And I had no idea how to study!  All those big britches expectations had set me up for a fall.  I could have faked my way through, but instead I started watching other kids and seeing what they did.  I intuitively knew that this wasn't something I could skip without disastrous consequences later.  If I hadn't admitted to myself that I didn't know what to do, I wouldn't have opened the door to learning how to study.  

And admitting what you don't know is so tough, yet so important.

You can act like you know everything.  You can even believe it yourself.  But sooner or later you'll need help.  And if you've been bragging to yourself about how you know everything, it's a long hard fall.  It's not the fall that kills you, either; it's the sudden stop at the end.  And if you've never been wrong in your life, that stop will blow your world apart.  

If, however, you've admitted to yourself that you don't know everything, that there are things you can learn in this life, you've taken one step.  That step will save you marathons later on, and it's worth doing just to learn how to ask for help.

A friend of mine reminded me of something important about admitting your imperfections the other day.  I was complaining about something I'm not good at.  "So you're not good at that," she said.  "So find someone who is.  Ask them for help.  Just think, if you were good at that, your future helper wouldn't be able to help you, and their life would be smaller for that missed opportunity."  

As a consummate helper, this struck home.  If I can reframe my weaknesses as "Opportunities for Elseone's Growth," then I'm helping them as much as being helped *by* them.  This gives that inner perfectionist of mine something to chew on, something that will take a long time to wear down before she starts screaming at me again.  

In some circles, that inner perfectionist is called "the gorram tapes".  We all seem to have that inner voice, the one that tells you exactly what you did wrong, and why you should have done it differently, and remembers each of your horrible nicknames in middle school.  This voice has no end.  For some, years of exposure to this voice wears them down to the smallest, saddest version of themselves.  Others learn coping techniques - disagreeing with the voice, dismissing it, or putting it on a raft in the ocean and waving politely (or with one specific finger) as it drifts away or gets swallowed by a shark.  Sometimes I stick a picture of my five-year-old pigtailed self in between me and that voice.  Then I say, "You want to yell at me?  Then you're yelling at her.  And if you yell at her, I'll take you OUT."  Shuts the voice up, every time.

As I write this, I'm struggling myself.  I cannot figure out where I thought I was going with this.  I can't see why anyone will want to read it, or why I thought my idea was any good, blah blah blah.  But I know whatever this post's imperfections, it's the first one in a series.  I will get better.  I will learn from my experiences and ask for help from others who are more skilled than I.  I will put that voice on a raft and tell it to take a hike.  I will face the challenges instead of letting them push me down.  

Maybe next time I'll play Firestarter while I write and cheer Charlie on while she burns up the bad guys.  Sweet!