Perfect Journey: My Journey to Loving Me
Yesterday, September 14th, I launched a site. I launched it after years of feeling like I was losing a battle to who/what I thought I should be. After many conversations with other women, I realized that striving for perfection had kept so many of us from loving ourselves. And then I thought about the next generation: the girls growing up in the world of filters, contour and the Kardashians. I freaked out. I decided it was time to create a place where women could bare it all. So Perfection Is A Myth was born.
23 women agreed to share pictures of themselves completely makeup free accompanied by their own journeys to self-love. I then asked the men in my life to write letters to women, pledges, if you will. Pledges to love us, respect us and reshape what they see as perfect and beautiful. Because, let’s face it, men play a huge role in what gets feed to us as sexy. They decide what’s too big, too small, too wide or too narrow. And we, as women, eat that shit up. No matter how ridiculous it is. So I asked men to hold themselves accountable. I asked them to challenge and rethink the messages they send to us. To be part of the solution instead of the problem. And they obliged.
I shared my journey as well. And here is a portion of it:
I have to be honest: all I’ve been thinking about is how to make this, my journey, be perfect. How to hit the right notes and illicit the right feelings. How to leave a lasting impression on the reader. How to give that perfect sense of who I am and how I got here. How to make this site something authentic and impressive. So, clearly perfection, or the pursuit of it, is a common nemesis.
The first thing I remember wanting to fix was my family. My parents divorced when I was young and I’d watched enough 90s TV shows to know — -that wasn’t perfect. Then I pointed my criticism to myself, I wanted to be thin. So thin. Because I’d watched enough movies to know that if I wanted to see myself on the big screen — -thin was perfect. Then it was my dreams: I wanted the perfect career, the perfect man, the perfect friends, the perfect life. I had it all planned out.
(oh yeah, I’m a planner — -one of the ways I feed my addiction to perfection. )
But in 2008, my father died. And all of a sudden the illusion of perfection was shattered. I mean, how could a girl be perfect with no father? For a while I abandoned my pursuit. Decided I’d give perfect a rest and give human a shot. It hurt. I had to stare down the barrel of the gun I’d been holding to myself for so long. The gun that routinely shot out “don’t eat that because you’ll gain weight”-s and “you’ll never be a leading lady, you’re too dark”-s and “work harder”-s and “you’re not good enough”-s. The gun that I convinced myself I needed to keep my eye on the prize felt like a weight I could no longer carry. But I was so comfortable carrying it that I felt naked without it. So I held on to it.
Read the rest of my journey and the journeys of 23 other women here.
