“Perfect.”
The word rolls off my tongue with such a foreign concept when I look at myself in the mirror as I try to fix one last patch of foundation to blend, a flick of the eyeliner, and smoothing out my outfit (on this day, the rare occurrence I wore a skirt) before I go off to a big meeting for a feature film that I ultimately will not get. The feeling of saying that word — perfect — is probably because I don’t actually believe it. At all. For someone who is so hellbent on seeming like she couldn’t give a shit, I feel more resignation when I look at the sight of my appearance. I am nowhere near perfect, but I try to frame what seems to be 85% of my best as ‘good enough’ before going out the door. That 100% positivity of achieving perfection is something I have rarely achieved in this life, no matter how successful or happy I am in the given moment, so that feeling of being perfect is a rarity. It doesn’t matter if I have achieved the biggest accomplishment or found the most joy. Because in my mind, if I am not perfect, what is the point?
I’ve had to be some form of “perfect” my entire life. Perfect as a daughter so when her parents split for good and needed to be proud of her while the world was crumbling down, she hid her own depression and anxiety she was white-knuckling for years to seem like she could handle it. Perfect as a student so when her fellow classmates growing up had bullied her to zero self-esteem left on the meter, she could laugh and joke her way to no one knowing she was secretly harming herself in multiple ways to keep everyone at bay and ask her how she had such a ‘positive’ attitude even when, as someone once said to her years later, ‘had the shit kicked out of her the entire time.’ Perfect as a partner who was so closeted in her identity for so long, she was fearful to fully express herself and also so fragile that she molded her thoughts and wanted to be adored and admired only to be trampled on in the end. Perfect as a businesswoman and as a performer that even the crushing rejection that constantly made her cry in her car could be covered with jokes and self-deprecation. Perfect as a friend that can take the brunt of everyone else’s problems, but when her own issues become too much to handle, no one is there to help shoulder the burden.
Perfection was destined for me even though I never asked for it.
It’s hard to be something you’ve been expected to do your entire life and yet all you seem to do is fail at it. Don’t get me wrong, failure is healthy and fantastic and inevitable, and I once had a professor in college tell me that I needed to “fail big and fail better,” but we in society are given such mixed signals, especially millennials who are constantly told they fuck up literally everything every single day, and personally, the signal I constantly get is “Kylie Sparks is not allowed to be flawed. She must be perfect or she will be sent to the gallows.” Even when I speak up about issues that matter to me or I raise a point in discussion or I confront someone I have a problem with, it must be thoughtfully executed or it will fail. Some of that is sexism, but mostly it's expectation.
To be honest, it’s absolutely fucked. Failure is exhausting. Words are exhausting. Perfection, however you define it, is fucking exhausting. It gets to the point I don’t even know how to handle everyone’s demands with my own problems that I just short-circuit and shut down.
When shit hits the fan, I usually have a go-to escape tactic of not telling anyone where I go for a few days (minus my parents, after all, one of them has to babysit my dog and I miss Scarlett too much) and hole up in a hotel somewhere. I can’t go totally off the grid, my entire livelihood now depends on a constant stream of social media, and for many it may seem detrimental, but for a second, I can actually breathe. I don’t worry about being perfect. I feel much more at ease telling everyone to actually go deal with their own lives and problems. I exclaim ‘I am not your therapist, I am not your babysitter, I am only me,’ and that enough is a burden sometimes when you constantly battle with that voice in your brain telling you you are ugly, unlovable, flawed, terrible, and every other shitty word you associate with yourself. In this moment, I can deal with not being perfect. After that, I can deal with what will happen when I return and battle again, Sparks versus Society in the arena of perception and perfection.
We all have this battle. And it’s bullshit to accept perfection. It’s time we start acting like it’s bullshit and accept that failure is fantastic and we are flawed beings. But until then, I’ll keep trying to fight the dragon and accept that my “good enough” is all that I need.
