Perfection; Finding the Art of Messiness
In my household growing up, everything always had to be perfectly presentable. The house was incredibly clean, not a speck of dust to be breathed in and sneezed out. There were whole areas of the home that I wasn’t allowed to access, each perfectly set up for a guest or like a museum. My mom dressed me up in perfectly pink dresses, with taffeta and frills and tight bows, and often pinned my hair to my head in tight coils so I’d wake up the next morning looking like Shirley Temple.
I hated Shirley Temple.
This was the late 80’s early 90’s. All I wanted to do was dress like Janet Jackson, play my music loud, cover my face in hideous makeup and have my hair in messy pony tails. None of that fit the tidy and neat picture my mother carried of the perfect child in the perfect household.
As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time outside, away from our perfect house and my angry perfect mother, instead getting messy in the woods that bordered our neighborhood.
As much as I resisted and hated my mom’s illusion of perfection, this need to be perfectly presentable stuck and I carried it with me into adulthood. Before friends came over to hang out, my house had to be super clean. I got ultra fit and very pretty, so that I could show up and be a leader in my industry. We built a great company from the ground up, but every time a customer was less than 100% pleased, I personally felt like a huge failure, even if the reality was the company was doing very well.
It was exhausting and completely invalidating no matter what was actually happening.
All of this perfection came to a screeching halt when my daughter was born. I remember, in that first day home from the hospital, my mother, visiting to “help out” commanded my husband to go outside and clean up the walnuts that were littering our back yard. “What would the neighbors think?” In that moment, I realized how her drive to be perfect had damaged her relationships and her ability to enjoy moments.
I cried, and loudly expressed my decision in that moment to choose love over perfection. My mother, embarrassed, gave up her tirade and my husband was allowed to come back in to snuggle with me and our new little bundle.
(Listen, I was allowed to cry. I was a brand new mom, exhausted from the birth and overwhelmed with the reality of bringing home a new baby. There were many many ways we felt unprepared and out of our depths!)
It also became impossible to keep up a clean house or to be perfect at work in those first years. Toddlers make everything messy, and if I had chosen to try to keep the place perfectly clean, it would have hurt my bond with my children and made me difficult to be around. I probably would have driven myself to an early grave.
I gave up being perfect for love and to give myself permission to really be in my own experience.
But that didn’t stop the programming that all that drive perfection created. The most insidious way this drive affected me was my relationship and acceptance of my body. I found it more and more difficult to show up and lead, especially as my body changed. Some days, I felt straight up troll-ish and I found myself hiding, with more and more reasons to hide, so that my imperfections wouldn’t be quite so on display. I put things off until I looked the part. Until I looked perfect.
This has taken years to undo, and I still work on clearing it. I know that If I keep waiting to show up until I’m perfect, I’ll just never show up. There will always be something messy, particularly as I move through deeper growth periods and clear the big things. Truly, I don’t even know what perfect is. There are so many pictures about what it is to be perfect and none of them belong to me. I know perfection is not real and therefore, I can never become that.
My mom wasn’t a bad person or a bad mother. She was just desperate to reach perfection and have that be validated by someone else. I think she thought that achieving perfection would have filled a hole in her. A place that she was afraid to look at and fill with her own energy-a part of her that was actually messy and wild and wonderful, but completely invalidated by the culture she grew up in. When she did allow herself to be messy, she was fun and silly, and those are my favorite memories of her. I think if she had found acceptance and love for her own messiness, she would have found the validation she so desperately looked for outside of herself.
Our messiness allows us to be who we are, to be unique, and to really show up fully present in our lives. When we strive for perfection, we don’t get to experience the entirety of ourselves and limit our own life experience. I think true happiness lies deep within the ability to accept and enjoy the messy imperfection of life. The spaces we can’t plan and execute perfectly. The colorful magic that happens in letting go of control. So I’m going to keep showing up, even on my messiest days, as long as it means being me. To me, that is the perfect life.
