Better Than Perfect

What I eat in a day.

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How I clean my house.

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My bedtime routine.

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My 5 to 9 before my 9 to 5.

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The best recipe for weight loss.

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My amazing at-home strength circuit for building muscle.

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And on and on and on.

We scroll through stories and videos, images and blurbs, singular moments of someone’s day, and all we see is perfection.

People who look better than us. Make more money than us. Have better relationships than we do. Have bigger, cleaner houses than we have. Are better mothers. Partners. Friends. Activists. Whatever they are showing, it's so much better than us. It’s perfect.

But the reality is, perfect doesn’t actually exist. It’s a farce. An illusion. A ploy to make us feel bad and buy more. And as much as we may know that logically, being faced with the impression of its existence and accessibility every time we look at a phone, a television, a movie screen, a magazine… It makes us think that it is all too real. Just not for us.

It can be hard to remember that what we are seeing is merely a moment. Not only a moment, but a planned, directed, filtered, edited, and highly curated moment, chosen specifically to make us feel this way. To make us believe that perfection is attainable if only we follow the right steps. If only we live the right way. If only we made the right choices. We, too, could have the perfect life if only we lived… perfectly.

But I remind you again - perfect doesn’t actually exist. The word perfect, in and of itself, reminds us of that. Perfect. Flawless. Without fault or defect. Pure. Expert.

And that is not what we are. That is not how we grow. That is not how we learn. And that is no way to live a life.

It is in our imperfections that we find our humanity. It is our mistakes that teach us our greatest lessons.

No baby learns to walk without falling down once, twice, dozens of times. No story, research paper, or novel is written in a single pass. Definitely no blog posts, either.

We need to fall down to learn how to get back up.

We need to do something wrong to learn how to get it right.

We need to crack to let in the light. We need to break open to expand.

And we need to be vulnerable in order to find our strength.

So pause. Take a breath.

And remember that your scars are proof that you dared to try. Your fears are proof that you are capable of feeling. Your messy house is proof that you are living your life. What you’ve perceived as your imperfections are not flaws… they are reminders that you are something even better than perfect.

Your imperfections make you human.

And they make you YOU.

And you are something even better than perfect. You are real. And that is what matters most.