Letting go of the flawed invention of perfectionism

I have always self-identified as a perfectionist, since the day I learned of the word. It makes sense for me. I’m comfortable when things are perfect.

You’re always told not to say that your greatest flaw in an interview is that you’re a perfectionist, because it’s a bit of a cliché, and can be easily spun around into a positive ‘hire me!’ message. So I don’t say it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Just last week I had a friend send me a message saying ‘I don’t think life’s ever going to be perfect and I think I’m okay with that now’.

This was a really interesting message to receive from a friend who is several years older than I am, and certainly appears to have his life in order. If I had to pick someone who had a perfect life, it’s him. Yet he’s been thinking the same thing that I have been wondering about for years. Somehow this makes me feel even stronger in my beliefs on perfectionism.

My immediate response was of course questioning where this came from (it was so out of the blue!), but then I responded ‘I don’t think perfection exists anyway’. Yet it seems to be something that everyone is striving towards in this day and age. Let me explain my issue with this.

Say in 100 years time, or 1000 years, will human kind have come any closer to perfection? The word perfect itself means ‘having all the required or desirable elements, qualities, or characteristics; as good as it is possible to be.’ What could this possibly mean in terms of people? We all have the same hairstyle? Do we all work the same job? Perhaps genetic engineering may be required. How can society possibly function in this world, where there is one standard of perfection applied to all?

My absolute favourite quote is “imperfection is beauty, madness is genius, and it is better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.” If I could improve the quote at all it would just be “imperfection is beauty”. I would shout it from the rooftops and pay for billboards, to show the message to anyone who is struggling with feeling in any way imperfect.

When you consider that perfection may lead people to converge into looking and acting one way, of course imperfection is beauty. That perceived imperfection is what differentiates one person from another, so of course it is beautiful.

So from now on, I’m going to cut myself some slack, and I suggest that you do too. Perfection is difficult to achieve, or maybe even impossible. To be honest, I’m not even sure perfection exists.

I’ll leave you with another quote:

“Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”