Perfectly Imperfect

This post was originally published on June 8, 2020, on Instagram as part of Her Growth Collective.

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This is not the post I intended to write tonight, but something tells me it is the post I need to write. Maybe, if only for myself. ⁠⠀

I intended to talk about how striving for perfection holds us back from taking action... but it's much more than that.⁠⠀

Striving for perfection holds us back from being ourselves.⁠⠀

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I love this picture of my daughter because it's just her. It radiates her confidence. It's a bold and unashamed glimpse of who she is. A girl who lives on the edge with her fashion choices and will never apologize for too much pink or too much glitter. A girl who EXPECTS to be seen.⁠⠀

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I can tell you 100% that was NOT me. Hell, most days that is still not me. American beauty standards and traditional beliefs about how girls SHOULD exist in the world seeped into my brain and eroded my self-confidence. I was never going to be the girl with the perfect personality, or the perfect hair, or the perfect outfit. Those things made me long to be invisible in social settings. And then being invisible made me lonely.⁠⠀

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I took refuge in action. I threw myself into my passions and my studies. I ran the clubs and got the grades, but I was never going to be valedictorian or win popularity contests. Most classmates thought I was intimidating and assumed I was mean. I learned to shrink in certain settings to survive.⁠⠀

In college I felt out of place whenever I would go out clubbing with the other girls in our dorm. I was taller, bigger, less manicured, less trendy. But I loved to dance so I kept going until I found a girl gang that got me.⁠⠀

Then I studied in Uganda. For the first week or so I still woke up every morning and put on makeup. I didn't feel like a complete person without it. The hot, hot temperatures made me realize that if I was going to survive the semester, the makeup had to go. Ugh! I was hideous! ⁠⠀

Until I wasn't.

Three months of your own makeup-free face looking back at you in the mirror recalibrates your brain. You start to realize that you don't need the makeup to feel good about yourself. That you might be - dare I say it - beautiful without it.⁠⠀

Once I got into the workplace I realized pretty soon that my perfectionist tendencies HAD GOT TO GO!!! Unless you are an airline pilot or a surgeon, no one cares if the work you produce is 95% instead of 100%. They care that you get shit done. (Getting shit done, by the way, requires learning to let go of that last 5% or 10% so that you can move on to the next item on the to-do list.) (Also side note, if you are a perfectionist there's a pretty good chance that your 95% is still raising the bar for your team as a whole.)

So here were are today. Grown women who have each developed our own set of neuroses collected over a lifetime of not measuring up to perfect. We know, logically, that perfection is a myth - and yet, we let it hold us back.

When I chose "brave" as my word this year it was to symbolize all of these things. Taking action, putting myself out there, and using my voice THIS YEAR. Not at some indescript point in the future when I had it all together.

2020 has really risen to meet me here. Each new crisis and disaster is a reminder that 2020 is my year to recalibrate again. From here on out, living a perfectly imperfect version of me is what I'm going for.

I'm tired of living a less than version of myself.

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This post is written in partnership with #HerGrowthCollective, encouraging women to walk the path of self-development together.