The Myth of Perfection

The biggest problem with the concept of Perfection is that it's a myth. What does this word even mean? Everybody's idea of perfect is different. What it means to you is, I guarantee, different than what it means to me. Which means we're all expending precious reserves of time and energy pursuing a chimaera. I watched the movie Gattaca the other night. (Yes, I'm a little late to the party, but this is not surprising. A lacking sense of time is one of my flaws.) If you haven't seen it, or did see it when it came out and can use a refresher course, the hero of our story is born as a biologically natural child in a world where most parents sit down with a geneticist to select which traits they want for their offspring. Flaws such as poor vision, medical problems, or a tendency to violence are eliminated. Our hero is small for his size, has to wear glasses, and is genetically predisposed to heart disease. But he wants, more than anything, to travel in space. In order to make his dream come true, he must take on the identity of a biologically superior male. It's a great story, and part of what fascinated me was that the more people pursued the idea of perfection, the farther from it they seemed to get. Even the biologically superior characters experienced a sense of not being good enough, of not measuring up. When I was younger I spent a lot of time worrying about my physical flaws. I've got several annoying body parts, the primary being a forehead that doesn't know when to quit. For most of my life I tried hairstyle after hairstyle trying to disguise the damned thing. This pursuit was complicated by a determined cowlick that defied all of my attempts at a nice set of bangs. When I met the Viking, he kept telling me to just let it be. Celebrate your hair the way it wants to grow, be who you are. He actually means this. And really, if it comes down to it, yes there are things I'd like to change about my body but you know what? It's mine, forehead and all. It's familiar and comfortable. It's been with me for my entire life and has served me well. I really don't think I'd want to trade it in. Imagine looking in the mirror one morning and finding another face looking back at you. No thank you. My real struggle is with all of those other flaws. With never quite being enough - not smart enough, creative enough, talented enough. Never the perfect parent or the perfect partner and certainly never the perfect housekeeper. As for the writing - oh, lord - the insecurity there could flood the planet. But again - what is this Perfection that I strive for? During the first year after my husband's death, when I was juggling grief, and grieving kids, and learning to single parent, and a job, and my classes for the Master's degree I happened to be in the middle of, I failed to get an A in one of my classes. This devastated me. I wept. I was seeing a Psychologist at the time, for grief therapy. He was a gifted counselor, brutally honest at times with truths that I needed to hear. He listened to me bemoan my failure and then had the gall to suggest that I was being narcissistic. I was furious. How dare he say such a thing? Obviously I didn't think I was better than everybody else, I had FAILED. But he was right. To somehow think that we should be perfect - which automatically implies being better than the others - is a narcissistic belief. What is so special about me that I should be a better student, a better parent, a better writer even, that the rest of the world? Nothing of course. The only person I have any business competing with is myself. These days I try to aim for my own personal best, rather than comparing myself to others. Of course I fail at this, as well, but it's a failure I can live with.

The Ugly Truth About Perfection

When Allison offered me her spot on Word Whores this week to do a guest post on imperfection, I was eager to find just the right angle to tackle. There’s so much to say about it, especially from the mind-set of a 20-something single New York woman who doesn’t fit the traditional mold of…well, the 20-something single New York woman.
So, I spent my entire subway ride home from work thinking about perfection, hoping for inspiration to strike. I tried to focus on imperfection, this week’s actual theme, but no matter what path my mind took, I kept straying to its opposite.
Maybe it’s because the word “imperfect” just isn’t a part of our daily jargon. But “perfect”? Perfect is plastered across magazine covers, spewing from the mouths of celebrity reporters—hell, I was brushing my teeth earlier and looked up to see it written on the back of my jar of face cream.

It’s everywhere. It’s staring us straight in the eye and challenging us to achieve the impossible. And while we’re constantly being spoon-fed the same old spiel about our imperfections being what makes us beautiful, inside and out, the ever-present concept of perfection is what rings in our ears. At least it does in mine.

I’ve been a perfectionist since I was a little kid. Not only did everything need to be neat and clean at all times, but I needed to get the best grades, to be the most liked, to stick every landing in every gymnastics competition. Granted, I didn’t succeed in any of those things, but my god did I want them. Nothing less was good enough.

To this day, I find that mentality sticking to every inch of my imperfect body, haunting every hour of my imperfect life. It doesn’t matter that I strongly believe in the power and beauty of imperfection, and that I’d never want to be really be a flawless, cookie-cutter replica of someone else’s idea of what I should be to consider me smart, funny, and attractive. But the place inside where the desire for perfection lives doesn’t care about those thoughts and beliefs. It only cares about finding whatever way it can to feel good enough.

Take this past weekend, for example. I went on my fourth date with a beautiful, beautiful man. I’m not even kidding—this man is gorgeous. His image has graced the covers of romance novels, the insides of fitness magazines, the month of August on the calendar maybe on some of your walls. And as embarrassing as it is for me to admit, I was proud to have him choose me, to walk into a restaurant with his arm around me and have him kiss me right there in public. Someone like him wanted someone like me.

Does. Not. Compute.

I’m certainly not model-material myself, and I won’t lie—self-image, like most women my age, is something I struggle with daily. But man, my miniature ego was being stroked goooooood for a change. I was loving it. And I was liking him, more than I anticipated. He was not only picture-perfect, but he was intelligent, ambitious, responsible, funny—the whole package. Hmmm…maybe there was promise after all.

But then there was the fear. The fear of not being enough, of not being that perfect yin to match his perfect yang (I so did not mean for that to sound dirty…but it did.). It still sat in my stomach like a Prometheus-sized boulder. I could ignore it when I was with him, but when I wasn’t? The recognition that I’d never be perfect, never be a member of his elite league was gnawing at me. Toss in some mixed signals from him and I was ready to tear my hair out.

So when I found out the next day that the potential and promise I was seeing for us was not quite the same thing he was seeing, you can imagine what happened. The confidence I had started to feel about being associated with such perfection shattered and I was grasping at straws again, wishing I were good enough. (Silly, I know, but true.) And through all the rejection I felt (despite that fact that I hadn’t really been rejected—I can still have fun with him for now if I want to), through all the sane thoughts and reasons why it wouldn’t have worked long-term anyway, through the entire list of qualities he doesn’t have that I want in a partner, I still kept thinking of him as perfect

This perception of perfection is ingrained in many of us from such an early age. As we get older, it gets easier to challenge, but it’s still just that: a challenge.

It hit me hard this weekend, but it also gave me the courage to admit my weakness and try to break down the cognitive distortions into clearer realities. Because maybe that’s all perfection really is—recognizing your imperfections, growing from them, and in the end, accepting the ones that you can’t change, taking all the power back….even if we don't yet view those imperfections as perfect pieces of ourselves.

Thanks for having me, Word Whores! Y’all rock my socks. :-)

Danielle Poiesz is a writer, reader, blogger, tea drinker, cat wrangler, pool shark, NYC transplant and Book Country's Editorial Coordinator. Follow her on Twitter: @daniellepoiesz

Imperfection

by Laura Bickle

Surrounded by images of artificial perfection, it can be tough to be wholly comfortable in one's own skin. I have a box full of hair rollers and a drawer brimming with makeup that attest to my desire to be pretty-perfect. Or at least, socially acceptable.

I find that the older I get, the more tolerant I am of imperfections as they emerge: a streak of grey hair, little bit of droopiness at the corners of my eyes, a softer middle. I work out, slather on anti-aging creams and worship at the altar of Miss Clairol every six weeks. But these are things that feel routine, now. Not some terrible indictment of the fact that I'm getting older and less attractive. It just, well, happens to everyone. If we're lucky.

I don't do all the primping that I did in my twenties. I feel perfectly okay with leaving the house with just lipstick and my hair pinned up. I don't feel the need to own an eyelash curler, any longer. I can't remember the last time I worried about whether I looked hot. Looking appropriate while heading out to work or a workshop, sure. But...I no longer obsess about perfect.

I've come to see imperfection is a constant part of life, in all aspects of it. This is my skin, and I'm mostly okay with it. Sure, I have bad days. But, for the most part, I am okay with what I am. Mostly because I'm loved, and that makes me feel a bit more like I can love myself.

In the spirit of imperfection, here's a photo of me taken at the local zoo on a rainy day a few weeks ago. No makeup, hair pulled back. I looked very imperfect that day. But I had a wonderful time cooing at the animals. I was happy. And I think it shows.