PERFECTLY ImPErFecT
“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” -Leonard Cohen
We pursue it every day: the perfect body, the perfect grade, the perfect life that seems effortless on somebody else's feed. It starts small, almost innocently. You edit, re-edit, and re-edit a single word in your caption twenty times. You delete a story because the "angle was wrong." You re-do your work simply to "perfect it." But at some point between all of the comparisons and little fixes, we begin to forget that being human was never about being perfect. Though perfection sounds lovely, it can be exhausting. It teaches us to tuck away the bits of us that make us different. It makes competition out of creativity. It makes self-love turn into self-punishment. We tend to forget or begin to believe that making mistakes is a weakness, when in fact, these mistakes are what make us grow.
Look around; nothing in life is perfect, yet everything is functioning harmoniously. Nothing in life is left unbroken forever, and that's ok. In Japan, there is a beautiful art called kintsugi to repair broken pottery with gold lacquer. Rather than hiding the cracks, the cracks are enhanced, reating something more precious from something that was once broken.
What if we were to look at ourselves in the same way?
Every scar, every failure, every “not good enough" moment, all of the things we try to hide in life - could in fact be the gold that makes us whole.
Even so, we as human beings often forget that. We devote so much of our time trying to fix ourselves, even to just be ourselves. We wait until things look right, until we feel right, until we think we have it all figured out. For some of us, that waiting never seems to end. We wait to be "ready," as if life begins only when everything is perfect. The truth of the matter is, to wait for things to be perfect usually means we never start at all. We are afraid of being criticized, we are intimidated when we believe we are not enough, we are paralyzed because we fear that our best is not good enough. And that fear quietly defeats our courage before we even begin.
The world does not need perfect people; the world needs real people. Real people who will acknowledge when they are not sure, real people who will show up anyway, real people who will turn their mess into stories worth telling. The tiny cracks in us are the spaces where the light enters, and that's what makes all of us attractive in our own way.
Similarly, success does not follow a direct line, even if that line were drawn perfectly. Success is a mess sprinkled with eraser marks and twists. The most inspiring individuals do not arrive in their position without error or flaw, they arrive because they take risk in being seen with error or flaw. But when they stop chasing after perfection, a beautiful thing happens , they begin living. They laugh more loudly, they love more deeply, they create more boldly. Their response to either question, “how is it going?” or, “how are you feeling?” transitions from, “I’m fine,” or, “I’m great,” to “I’m still figuring it out,” with pride. So, if you ever have experienced that pressure to be perfect, stop for a moment. Take a long breath.
Look at how far you’ve come so far, even if it is not perfectly polished. You can be a work in progress. You can step, stumble, reformulate your story, start again, and again. Because the most beautiful stories were never written in a straight line. Their journey welcomed mistakes and lessons. And that is the kind of perfection the world needs.
