Friday, May 11, 2018

It Is Okay To Fail: Ditching Perfectionism

Do you have any flaws? If you answered no, you would be lying because everyone has them. Flaws are something everyone has yet doesn’t talk about because they can make us appear less than perfect and in our world we want to be seen as perfect. This is personified to us when we are children and only gets reinforced as we get older. Throughout our schooling years we are told we must study and get great grades so we can get into the perfect college. While we are in college, we are told we need to be our best person and should look our best so we can meet the perfect partner. After we met this perfect partner the list continues to strive to have the perfect house, perfect job, perfect kids and the list goes on. While it is okay to have goals and aspirations the problem is that perfection is a fallacy. There is not one thing on this earth that is perfect, yet on a daily basis we strive to be perfect and always fall short due to the inability to be perfect. Constantly striving to be perfect brings feeling of failure, self doubt, anxiety and depressive thoughts.

 I unfortunately have been struggling with the need to be perfect my whole life and while I am better than I used to be still find myself trying to attain perfection. The need comes from the desire to be the best version of yourself however a problem exists when you have already done your best and still blame yourself for your shortcomings. I remember in elementary school we used to have a pre-spelling test on Thursdays and if you spelled all of the words correctly you didn’t have to take the test on Friday. While I was not a terrible speller I always got at least one word incorrect and this caused me to have to take the test again while my friends got to play. At this point in my life I was about eight years old but the fact that I had to take the test again made me feel as if my classmates were smarter and better than me due to them simply being better at spelling. This is a terrible burden for an eight year old to hold, however I lived with it and carried it throughout my life to the point where I am finally fed up with self doubt and the need to be perfect. Self doubt and perfection causes us to constantly ask what we did wrong and how we can get it right next time. It causes us to blame ourselves for things which are completely out of our control. Finally, it destroys our spirit and causes us to carry around negative oppressive energy which eliminates the beauty of the world. This blog has no intention to make you feel sorry for me and the struggles that I have had in my life but rather to make you realize that perfection is impossible and that it is okay to make mistakes in life. You don’t have to ace every test, you are not expected to get your dream job out of college, and you don’t have to meet a life partner at a specific time period. It is okay to fail because it will make you learn who you are and how strong you are despite all of the obstacles in life. So next time you feel the desire to doubt yourself don’t because giving it your all is enough. Remember perfection is a fallacy and should be eliminated from our lives

Please enjoy the song Get it Right from Glee which personifies what happens when our desire to be perfect overrules our life

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