perfect disaster

So today I realized how funny it is that I’ve spent my whole life pursuing something that doesn’t exist.

Think about it. When was the last time you did something that was truly perfect in every way? Can you pull it off every single day? Every moment? Has every hairstyle you’ve attempted, or conversation you’ve had, or report for your boss been absolutely, spot-on, 100% perfect?

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say “no”.

We idolize actors and models that are presented to us as true standards of perfection…and then we find out that their personal lives are in shambles, their pictures are airbrushed, and at the end of the day they’ve got dark circles under their eyes and coffee breath just like the rest of us.

So what do we do?

Instead of admitting that we’re all just human and getting on with our lives, we put our noses to the grindstone even harder than before, and tell ourselves that if we just try a little harder and carry mints in our purses and get six hours of sleep instead of five, we’ll make it. We’ll be perfect. And even if we mess up and curl our hair the wrong way or somebody breaks our heart, we just slap a smile on our face and soldier onward without admitting to ourselves or anyone else what we truly want, because that’s what perfect people do.

In the name of the Moon, I'll make you feel totally inadqueate about yourself!

As any reader of fanfiction can tell you, perfection may exist…but it’s annoying as hell. The dreaded Mary Sue (or Gary Stu, if you prefer) has been wreaking literary havoc for many years now. She is a fearsome beast, comprised of the author’s either conscious or subconscious desires to be the perfect person they can’t be in reality. Her favorite lair seems to be amongst Harry Potter fanfiction, where the student body is suddenly invaded by a beautiful, (but not too beautiful) vulnerable, highly intelligent and capable young lady can speak sixteen different languages and always has the right answer at the right time.

I’ve done it. My particular vehicle was Sailormoon fanfiction, not Harry Potter, but it’s the same difference. And it was nice, being able to create the person I wanted to be and put her into a world where she could thrive. Yes, there was conflict, but it was never more than she could deal with. And if it was, then she had friends to support her. It was the life I didn’t have. I didn’t understand how to cope with conflict. I didn’t have many friends. I also wasn’t tall, beautiful and able to defeat hideous monsters by shooting sparkly laser beams at them. But it was a fun fantasy.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, I got the impression I could make the fantasy real if I tried hard enough. (Well, maybe minus the laser beams. But I do have a key chain that has a red light on the end of it. Might not slay any monsters but it does amuse the cat.)

I’m not so self-involved to think I’m the only person carrying this particular burden. I see it around me all the time. In fact, it seems to be a deeply set facet of human nature to constantly desire to be perfect in one’s own life. Maybe this comes from a desire to avoid conflict. Maybe it’s an evolutionary drive to improve oneself and others. Whatever the reason, I feel much the same about it as I feel about the evolutionary reason for giving me hormonal fluctuations that result in me breaking out in hideous and painful zits once a month: I fucking hate it.

I don't care if my bladder bar is in the red. I have to make the bed first.

For some reason, I am the ultimate perfectionist. When Wil Wright’s team designed the Sims and came up with the “perfectionism” trait, they had probably been talking to someone who knew me. And it’s getting worse as I get older, which really pisses me off. Emotional issues are supposed to get better as I get older, not worse. (what happened to that childhood hope that when I grew up, everything would be sunshine and roses? I miss that particular fallacy.)

So now I live my daily life, obsessed with things being perfect. Mostly myself. My god, why can’t I rocket out of bed each morning at 6am after only being asleep for six hours feeling energized and excited about my day? Why can’t I gobble down a healthy breakfast of Grape Nuts and bananas and scrambled tofu and set about my day of building my own corporation from scratch, writing amazing novels, learning foreign languages, doing sixteen different forms of exercise flawlessly before cooking amazing food for my boyfriend and then topping it all off by going out with all my perfect friends later that evening in a skin tight dress and getting just the right amount of drunk before going home to go to bed and repeat it all the next day? Oh and let’s not forget that throughout all of this my makeup is spot on, my breath smells like peppermint and roses, my boobs never itch, I never fart, and my hair doesn’t have a single flyaway.

Go ahead and laugh for a second. I’ll wait.

Done? OK. Now try to imagine living every day of your life secretly believing you should be able to do all of that if you just tried hard enough.

Welcome to my private hell.

I suppose I should have grown out of these beliefs at some point. But it’s not really something anyone ever talks about in terms of “growing out of”. You just sort of…give up at some point, and become bitter about it. There are hundreds of thousands of people right now who, if asked, would say they hated someone they know or someone they see on TV/YouTube because they’re “too perfect” or they “think they’re all that”. (I got hit with that last zinger a lot as a kid/preteen, and I still have no idea why.)  They say that you shouldn’t ever try to be perfect because you just can’t get there, with that venomous tone to their voice that says instead: “I would love to be that perfect, but I can’t be, so I’ve given up and become jaded about it.” That’s not dealing with it. That’s using hatred to cover it up.

Then there’s the folks who will say: “God made you perfect. You’re perfect in His eyes.” Well fat lot of good that does me, Atheist of the Month. OK, so an imaginary old man floating about in the sky somewhere who’s watching my every move and listening to my every prayer made me perfect? That doesn’t help my issues. And if that were true, then why am I constantly being JUDGED (yes, in all capitals, it’s that 4srs) by aforementioned old codger? What’s there to judge, if I’m already perfect? Why do I have to worry about it? Oh, I have free will and therefore I can make poor choices which make me unworthy of salvation unless I repent of them. My brain hurts now, and guess what…I still want to be perfect because God tells me I should be! Welcome back to Square One.

Or, better yet, there’s the Karmic Redemption set. I’m here to iron out all my imperfections that I’ve carried over from my last life (which I don’t remember) and resolve issues from that life in the hopes that when I finally do snuff it, I can become a formless ball of energy and frolic about the universe with all of my energy ball buddies. We won’t have bad breath or boobs/nuts that itch because we don’t have bodies! Yippee! We can sit around and talk about stardust all day. Awesome. Because achieving celestial perfection through being a better person while you’re a stinky, itchy sack of meat isn’t a pressure to be perfect AT ALL. Thumbs up, Karmic Set. You’re almost worse than the Bible thumpers on this one.

Do you have any coupons?

At our jobs, we’re encouraged to be perfect. In fact, my work experiences made it quite clear to me that my employers would have been over the moon if I had suddenly turned up for work one day having been converted into a Borg drone, no longer needing sleep, food, breaks, or payment. I would do exactly what my hive programming instructed me to do without complaint or thought. Sure, all my cyborg bits might freak out the customers a little, but they’d get used to it because most of them never saw me as a person in the first place. As long as I was available to do all the things they didn’t want to do, they’d be fine. Cashiers, clerks, and those kids at the drive-thru are famous for their dead-eyed stares, anyway. Wouldn’t make much difference if one of those dead eyes was replaced with a scary red laser thing, now would it?

In our personal lives, we’re encouraged to be perfect. “Keeping up appearances” has been a phrase bandied about in far too many marriages and several television shows. Who are we keeping up appearances for, anyway? All the other poor sods who are having the exact problems we are? They don’t give a fuck. If there’s one thing I’ve learned recently, it’s that other people don’t care about you nearly as much as you think they do. Are you worried that your makeup looks a little funny or that you put on a couple pounds? No one gives a fuck because they’re too busy worrying about the same god damn thing. Husband and wives should fight, but make up after. Young couples should be so madly in love with each other (but only for an appropriate amount of time, mind you) that they can’t see straight, make rational decisions, or walk into a room without “glowing”. They never argue, disagree, or have differing opinions, otherwise their relationship is doomed to failure. Old people shouldn’t be clingy and annoying even though they’ve been abandoned by their families, haven’t hardly been spoken to for years, and treated like errant children when in point of fact they’re still adults and have been a lot longer than anyone else.

I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who refuse to complain about anything because “it’s not right to cause a fuss”. Back at my old job we actually found one of the older guys passed out on the fucking sidewalk because he had insisted on pushing in carts even though he felt poorly. He could have passed out in front of a car and died. But it just wouldn’t do to be seen as a squeaky wheel, so what does he do? He clams up about it and goes outside to work anyway. His reward is a wash of pity and love from his peers and family. Oh, and a brain tumor. Never mind that old thing. Too busy being perfect.

A long time ago, I came up with a nice little roundabout phase: “Perfection is imperfection.” I created it when I started writing and I realized that characters were boring without conflict. So were stories. When it comes to writing, that is the golden phrase. You want your characters to be whole people, complete with flaws and imperfections, otherwise the readers won’t relate to them. And why? Because your readers are imperfect human beings. Why? Because that’s what being human means: A fuckton of imperfection. All the time. Without fail. Fucking deal with it.

So yeah. I’m sick of the hamster wheel my brain has become. I’m not saying you should never strive to be better than you are, or to improve yourself and your surroundings. Whatever purpose it serves, that’s part of being human. I’m not sure where that constant drive to better oneself comes from, or what it will lead to as humanity progresses, but it’s there. I can’t shut it off. But from now on I’m really going to try and be less of a perfectionist. It’s exhausting. It’s come close to destroying my life a couple times. It’s made me contemplate suicide. And most of all, it’s not possible.

Maybe someday, I’ll honestly grow out of it. I hope so. I also hope that someday, alongside how to spell, write, and read, we’re taught how to deal with the destructive, painful, circular thinking that the concept of “I must be perfect” causes. And maybe we’ll stop telling our kids from day one that they need to cry less, socialize more, and learn their figures otherwise they’ll be doomed to a life of failure. And while we’re on the subject…I’m tired of all my problems automatically dooming me to a life of failure. I’m not doomed to a fucking thing! Life is life. “Doomed to a life of failure” implies that there’s some kind of life out there that isn’t worth living. That, to me at least, doesn’t seem to quite ring true.

There are things that make you happy, there are things that are good for you, and there are things that make you unhappy and that aren’t good for you. These four categories intermingle freely and aren’t always mutually exclusive. Maybe you hate folding laundry, but love pulling open a drawer in your wardrobe to find all your clothes neatly put away. So you fold laundry, even though it makes you unhappy.You’re happy for days after, because something that took you twenty minutes lasts all week. Huzzah. Cue peasants rejoicing.

And hey. If you didn’t hate yourself so much for not being perfect, maybe you wouldn’t be in that dark, unhappy, “doomed” place you’re in now, would you? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve ruined my own day because I’ve felt guilty or ashamed for not spending my time efficiently or for not exercising enough or whatever the fuck my Perfection Hamster is rabbiting on about that day. It’s bullshit. All of it. Bullshit. It’s just like guilt. As my mom would say: It’s a bag of bricks. Put it down and walk away.

Either that, or take one of the bricks and lob it at the head of whoever it was who told you should be perfect in the first place. Y’know. Whichever.