How to Remind Yourself You Don’t Have to be Perfect
Make beautiful and messy mistakes
For most of my life I’ve struggled with perfectionism. After years of therapy and personal healing work, I’ve discovered that one of the things that makes me feel most alive is making glorious mistakes. Mistakes like losing my temper, mistakes that offend others, mistakes that show that my life isn’t all together like I tend to pretend. As my therapist told me that shaped my perfectionist outlook: you don’t have to try your best at everything. You get to choose what you try your best at. Not everything is worth your best effort.
Making mistakes and not trying my best for everything have given me a taste of life that I’ve never experienced. In my brilliant mess-ups I’m allowed to reflect and make apologies. I’m allowed to use my mistakes as ways of seeing what I need to work on — not to be perfect, but to be human. Where once I would hold myself like a robot in terms of always polite, never rocking the boat, never allowing my true self coming out, and always appearing like someone who has everything under control, figured out, and perfect, now I have loosened up and allowed myself to come out. I’ve allowed the human parts of myself to flourish and seep out.
In seeking perfection, we compound our trauma and even deceive ourselves about how healthy we…
