The Downside of Perfection

There is definitely only One who is perfect. 

Thank heavens it isn’t me… and it isn’t even you. 

So, why do we want to be? Perfect, that is.

There is an obsession for perfection in the world around us. The pressure to be perfect is absurd. It’s probably the most damaging obsession we can have. It starts small and gets bigger with each perception change.

It might look at little like this:

Is this a time in your life when you feel you need to do everything right, say the right things, look a certain way? Are you feeling the pressure of being the best parent on the block, the one who has the coolest car, coolest life, showiest job or showiest body?

Or are you the one who hides behind a frozen, pretend smiley face to avoid revealing what you are really thinking? 

Do you sometimes say to yourself “I’m glad I’m wearing this medical mask that hides my imperfect face or my true expression.” 

Or are you at the point where you have had enough of perfect pictures of perfect lives, lived in perfect relationships, with perfect behaviors, too posed pictures, and oh, so coordinated selfies? 

It is 2021 and it is as if we have gone back in time and turned the “Stepford” wives into our “Stepford” lives. That movie premiered decades ago and it is still echoed in too many present day lives.

Certainly it is a good thing when people are sincerely happy, when people strive to be the best they can be.

It is a good thing when you are truly living your best life.

But that best life is not the best because it is a faultless life. There is no such thing!

There IS no perfect wedding, perfect marriage, perfect house or perfect child or perfect grandchild!!  There is no perfect grand dog…well, maybe there is :-). 

We are not perfect human beings and never will be.

We make mistakes.

We even make the same mistakes over and over again. 

Why is that so hard to say? 

Sometimes we don’t learn life lessons exactly when we should. That doesn’t mean we’re slow. It just means we are on a different time table than the person sitting beside us. Sometimes those life lessons have to hit us on the head, and knock us down before we pay attention to their harsh punch lines. That takes time.

Why is it when we falter in public that the first reactions from some people are: 

-“Oh, I thought they would know better than that.” 

-“I thought she was such a good person. What happened?”

-“Hmmm… isn’t that interesting? That’s not who I thought he was.” 

These are usually accompanied by a sanctimonious “tsk tsk!”

A simple slip from the usual and we are condemned for life. 

That type of thinking is ridiculous. It is the thinking that stems from believing that we and others need to be perfect 100% of the time. 

It’s a dangerous self-defeating premise.

The pressure to appear perfect is real and relentless. It is an insanely unhealthy expectation for ourselves and those around us. 

We humans are hard on each other, so very hard!  And as a result we are then too hard on ourselves. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I don’t really know. All I know is that it is a devastating cycle of shame.

We need to break that negative cycle by giving ourselves and others a break.  It’s called grace. We need to extend grace to all those imperfect humans around us and to the imperfect human whose life we are living. 

We’ve got to loosen up and start chilling, as they say!  

You know the thing about perfection is, it is an illusion anyway. The only way you can continue to hold up that illusion is if you never say anything different, or controversial; never interact with others more than 10 minutes at a time; never step outside your emotional comfort zone; never enter into the lives of others; never engage in a real relationship. That, my friends, is too big a price to pay for that ill-placed illusion.

What you get in return for that is a big, fat NOTHING! 

ROI=Zero!

Give me a selfie where everyone’s hair is a frightful mess from the wind;  where the shamelessly, open-mouthed smiles tell you they are having the time of their lives. Show me your messy house and I’ll find the love tucked in all those tousled corners. Show me your yard with weeds and I’ll happily understand that the clover and the persistent dandelions are nourishing the bees. 

Give me real friends, real relationships. Give me honest discourse. Give me the raw and true. Tell me the thoughts you are actually thinking. 

I don’t want them polished up before you share them with me. 

I want to know what you are deep down thinking, feeling, and hoping for. 

And when I make a mistake, (which I will do on a regular basis) I need you to say: 

“That’s ok.”

“Hey, friend, you’re talking nonsense right now. What’s going on?”  

“It’s ok that you don’t have it right, right now.” 

“I have faith in you and you will figure it out in time.” 

“How can I help you look at this differently?”

“It’s ok. That mistake was in the past. Let it go!”

“Nobody’s perfect.”

I know I cannot be perfect and I don’t need you to be perfect either.  

Here’s what’s wrong with friends or family putting someone on a pedestal: 

Sooner or later that someone is going to tumble off that precarious pedestal and crash to the floor.  

When that happens, the oh-so-perfect facade falls down too and the real is revealed.  

The last thing we need at that time is harsh criticism. 

What we do need is a reconciliation of who we are. 

We need a righting of our world and our own projections of it. 

And then we will need real mercy and forgiveness. 

We need a world with a whole lot of REAL.

 Let’s smile our gap-toothed smiles and show what’s really in our hearts.

 We’ll be so much happier for it. We may even love ourselves again.

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Excerpt from The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams

“What is REAL?”asked the Rabbit. 

“It doesn’t happen all at once”, said the Skin Horse. 

“You become. It takes a long time.” … “Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose joints and very shabby. 

But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” 

James 3:2    We all stumble in many ways.