Perfect hair. Perfect skin. Perfect smile. Perfect make up (or let’s say you are just perfect without any make up). PERFECT BODY. All of that captured on a photo taken in an immaculate room: perfect life.
Thoughts come rushing into my head, one jumping across the other like a restless flock of rabbits, all in a hurry to get out first. What is it that I want to say first when I talk about perfection?
Maybe I’ll start with a confession then. My whole life I wanted to be perfect. No actually, it wasn’t a wish. It was a desperate deeply rooted unconscious need. It was a program, it was a mission, it was all I ever did and thought about. But above all this, it was a struggle.
Perfect employee, perfect girlfriend, perfect eligible bachelorette, perfect entrepreneur, perfect valued client, perfect cook, perfect … All that while feeling completely inadequate at the same time. What a hell are we capable of thrusting ourself into?
Why so often do we slide into extremes? Say you are not entirely happy with yourself why not just improve the things that bother you, why the reaction needs to be to aim for perfection.
It’s unreachable. It’ s ugly. And it’s boring too.
The immense weight of all the effort to keep up with our exaggerated expectations of ourselves is just too much to bear. It eats at your time, the most precious possession of yours. And then in the end we can never win.
Oh, all the pretty photos of the fleeting and carefully arranged moments you see everywhere. I never tend to blame social media for anything because nothing ever is the fault of the technology itself, it’s just the way people decide to use it. And in this case they decided to torture each other with presenting a fake reality. Ideals that can’t be kept for more than a few mere seconds because after that comes the reality that is random, messy, often unpredictable and … (hence) beautiful. Don’t get me wrong. I love beauty, aesthetics and I will always love pretty things. But perfection? It does turn my stomach around.
It’s time to let go. It’s time to live now. Now is when it all happens.
Mess up your hair and get your hands dirty. Do things that calm you down or pleasantly increase your heartbeat, not things that you think you ought to do, yet only cause you anxiety and stress.
It is time to abandon all the ridiculous ideas about what life should be. Who you should be. How should you look. It is time to stop living according to the rules of the people around you. It is time to stop being obsessive about your own rules too, it is time to revisit them and LET IT ALL GO and just be. Be a wildflower. Be liberated.
PS: The cover photo is my favourite “imperfect” espresso cup… every time I drink coffee it reminds me of one very important thing 😉
