Blog

I’ve never felt like this before, but just a few days ago I was writing a story on a writing website, and I realised with a suddenness and kinda giddiness that no one here knew the real me. No one knew my name, who I was, what I did.

I could literally be whoever I wanted to be, and no one would judge me. I realised that I didn’t need to be perfect.

The main reason these thoughts enter our minds is because we humans always strive for perfection when instead we should realise once and for all that perfection doesn’t exist. Like, everyone tells us the same thing. Perfection doesn’t exist.

So, in a world where everyone looks around for guides and techniques that work that could help them become perfect (or at least better than the rest), I’ve come here with a guide that asks: How to (Not) Be Perfect? Or, put forward more simply, how to forgive yourself for not being perfect? One of these days, life will knock you down because it would be another one of its lessons, and then it would demand for you to stand back up.

What will you do then?

Some people set out to change the world. They try and try, they work hard and lead themselves to exhaustion, hoping that what they’ll get at the end of ut all will be worth it.

I’ll tell them what it is. Nothing is worth your mental peace and happiness. Nothing in the whole world is worth giving yourself fret and worry over it. Remember this when you set out to change the world. You won’t be perfect. If you’re new to my blog series My Formula for Changing the World, now is probably a good time to start.

The Myth About Perfection

You couldn’t ever be perfect, as we already discussed, because there’s no such thing as perfect (though it may seem so sometimes that your partner is perfect, or your competetive classmate or colleague is perfect, or pretty much everyone is perfect except you).

In those times, you’d need your own company the most of all, and you’d have to be the one to tell yourself that it’s okay if all that you do doesn’t bring out the best in you, or if all that you create isn’t always the best there is out there.

It’s okay if you have bad days or if someone is better than you at something, or if you feel the need to cry ugly. It’s also okay if you’re doing your best and you’re seeing the positive results and feeling guilty because you think you don’t deserve this. You do. (This actually had to be mentioned here because this is a trait of self-sabotaging behavior and, if we look at it then, so is perfection.)

I’ve realised now that the greatest thing about perfection is that it isn’t oxygen: you don’t need it to survive. You can work pretty well without it too, and I’d say that it’s more productive and helpful to work without a condition of “being perfect” hanging over your head constantly every minute of every day.

The thing about perfection is that you don’t need it to survive. 

Like, it isn’t oxygen. 

You don’t need it like you need oxygen. 

Okay, I understand. I perfectly understand your ambitious mindset and your goal of being the best out there so you show the world who you are.

Maybe you have this burning desire to be perfect in whatever you do, be the master of your skill, and maybe you chase perfection day and night, timelessly, tirelessly; and then you can’t find it because as they say, perfection doesn’t exist. 

Not in humans, at least. 

And then maybe it disappoints you a lot, because you did not get what you wanted. That’s…

Pretty understandable. 

You are justified in getting upset over it. You are justified in getting distressed over something you wanted but didn’t get. 

It’s okay, try again tomorrow. 

But, did not being perfect kill you? Did it disable you or something, preventing you from being better tomorrow? Did it present any hurdle in your path to success, or whatever it is you want? 

No. It just disappointed you. 

You expected too much. That’s okay, we all do. And we all shouldn’t. 

Back to perfect and the strange relationship it has with the human race. 

We crave perfection. 

The truth is that we humans crave perfection passionately. We have superiority complexes where we want to be the best in everything we do and the only way to get that is to be perfect. Effortless. Flawless. We chase it blindly, and when we don’t get it—

It’s okay, we just accept that being the best out there is pretty significant too, and we stop chasing perfection.  

That’s the thing. You don’t need perfection. 

And yet all of us think we do. Why?

Why Do We Want To Be Perfect?

If we come to think of it, there are plenty of crazy, weird reasons why anyone might think that being perfect is their solution, that being perfect was what they were meant to do after all. It was fate, blah blah, whatever. Some people think life goals are only considered reasonable and worthy when they are best aligned with perfection.

Crazy world we live in. We think perfection is the cure of problems.

#1 The Overachieving Personality Trait:

Of course, the most obvious reason why anyone would ever want to sacrifice day and night and food and sleep in order to be the flawless is that this is in their DNA. Or this has been fed to them by society and also maybe the adults that have played a significant role in their lives since childhood.

This is the overachiever. The personality traits that justifies you taking one step more further.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with going the extra mile. There’s nothing wrong with working harder than ever either. There’s just something wrong with keeping the destination as perfection. There’s something definitely wrong with becoming obsessed with not the thing you had set out to do, but with the image of becoming a faultless amazing god you see yourself as.

The most wrong thing is to punish yourself for not living up to your expectations.

#2 Validation and Approval

This motive for perfection is popular and widely seen in society—the need for approval.

If you are perfect, be it in whatever profession you are, people will respect you. You won’t even need to ask for it, people will throw themselves at you and worship your hard work on your messy altar and take examples and ask for advice.

That’s crap.

Respect is earned, not through working like crazy and becoming a brand or a legend (though that works too) but respect can also be earned through kindness and humility and giving respect in return.

And the thing is that so many, literally, so many of us look for society’s approval and validation for our success because we think we’re only successful if, and until society says so. This might not always be true as success is also internal is some ways.

#3 Aversion to Disappoint Someone

Many times people want to be the absolute perfect human being because they feel like they’d be disappointing someone if they ever fell short.

Maybe someone feels like they’re disappointing their parents, families, peers, mentors, society, or most commonly, themselves. In those cases, to live upto expectations, people would crave the feeling of perfection.

Since perfection brings attention, it’s a pretty good reason to strive to be perfect if you just want someone special’s attention and want them to be proud of you.

#4 Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Not your mistake. Maybe your OCD working.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is characterised by unreasonable thoughts and fears (obsessions) that lead to compulsive behaviours.

Sometimes it just so happens that your mind isn’t settled until things look good, and things don’t look good until they’re perfect, and that is mainly how obsessive compulsive disorder works.

The best solution here would be not to listen to me, because I’m definitely not a psychiatrist who can help you with your OCD. If you ever feel that your disorder is getting out to control, do contact help and get better. It might be the very thing preventing you from letting go of preconceived notions of perfectionism.

Why Perfection Doesn’t Exist

You can’t be perfect. I can’t be perfect. It’s not, like, personal, or anything. There’s not some grudge life holds against you or me.

We all know that humans are faulty beings. We are messy people and we are proud of it. It’s not in our DNA to be flawless. You can pretend that you are perfect, you can present a facade but you can’t actually be a god, you know. 

Everyone among us has a fault. Some have a variety of them. It’s just how it is. And instead of trying to erase these faults our whole lives so we can at last be happy, we can just embrace them. We can just accept these deformities. Accept these mistakes. 

We can just accept that we have scars, and if needed, we can put on make-up. Conceal them, hide them from the world, for whatever reason. No one has a bloody say in what you want to do with your scars. 

But we can’t wish we never had the scars. They kinda, might’ve had a hand in making us stronger. We never know. 

So there it is: 

We don’t look for perfection, or we’ll be looking all our lives, deciding, more like promising ourselves to be unhappy until we get it. Isn’t that we usually do? Decide we’re going to remain unhappy until we get what we want. Like a stubborn child.

We decide to be unhappy until we become perfect.  

We can instead chase excellence. Chase self-satisfaction. Sufficiency. We can go that way. And who knows, maybe at the end of that road, we’ll be closer to perfection than we ever were. Close. 

Just a few steps more and we could achieve it. Achieve the unattainable. 

Few more steps…

Just…

Alas, you would already be at the end of the road. 

Consequences of Perfectionism

Takes the fun out of activities:

When you work so you can be perfect, you only look for perfect and not for the fun in what you do. When you create something, you have to make sure that you don’t just create it for the perfection (because that will disapppint you). You have to create everything with heart and with soul because that’s the only way you’ll be creating something amazing.

Procrastination:

One of the major and unwanted negative effects of perfectionism is the ever-present, widely-loathed devils of today’s world: procrastination. If you can’t do things the perfect way, you don’t do them at all. This is actually the mentality of many people.

They wait for perfection, and perfection never arrives, (because perfection can’t arrive) and so they end up waiting for their whole lives. Okay, maybe that’s far-fetched because you won’t actually be able to wait for your whole lives.

But procrastination takes away a big chunk of your time that you could use otherwise in more important, more productive tasks.

Anxiety:

And then there comes a time when you cross the limit.

This is when your perfectionism goes farther than it ever should have, and now every instance that passes with disappointment and distress, the anxiety blocks gather more and more on your head.

The result would only be that your anxiety goes over the board and you end up feeling overwhelmed with the unbearable amounts of stress.

How to Forgive Yourself For Not Being Perfect?

How to let go of perfectionism?

So this is what this blog post was originally about, how to forgive yourself for not being perfect? How do you forgive yourself? I know it seems monumental to do so when you’re highly into the perfectionist spectrum.

If everything you want perfect even falls a little short of it, you start blaming all the forces of the universe—yourself included.

Needless to say, I know you this too, that this needs to stop. This self-sabotaging, this process of slowly and slowly killing yourself through too many expectations, it all needs to stop.

How do you do that?

#1 Perfection Isn’t Oxygen

This is how we began this blog post, and this should conveniently be how we’ll progress towards its end.

At the end of the day, the thing we should keep in our minds is that perfection really is not the equivalent of oxygen and there’s no one telling us that we should understand it as such.

We don’t need perfection to survive. We shouldn’t.

Even if we aren’t perfect, we’d live.

Keep that in mind.

#2 Accept your flaws

There will be times in life when you’ll fall short. Accept this.

There will be times when even your best won’t be enough, and you’ll feel awful for not getting what you wanted. Accept that it’s okay and tell yourself that you’ll try again harder tomorrow.

Accept the fact that someone else may be better than you at something and they might end up teaching you something through it.

Accept that you won’t be perfect in your approach of life. Accept that it’s reasonably, definitely, perfectly okay.

#3 Stop Judging

The thing you need to do is to stop judging everyone. Everyone includes you.

Let’s talk about you.

Whoever you are, whatever you do, however you look (even if it’s nowhere near to society’s “typical standards”) it isn’t that big of a problem as long as are okay with it.

Life becomes easy when you come to terms with yourself, when you become your own friend and talk to yourself as you would with a loved one.

We all forget to do this, very often, more often than we realise.

We talk down to ourselves, call ourselves out on things we wouldn’t call others out on, we criticize whatever we do at every moment of life. We think it’s all in a joking manner and nothing’s serious, but our minds and consciousness is wired to take everything it hears seriously.

So, forgive yourself. Befriend yourself.

#4 You’ll Never Achieve Perfection

It’s already determined.

You won’t ever be perfect in life because you’ll fall short of it.

It’s either you whine and cry and fret over it all your short life, or you go ahead and try to make whatever you have work.

My advice? Learn to live with it.

 

You Can Be The Best

Suppose you are an artist. And you know that in art we don’t look for perfect. We look for peace. So you do just that and publish your artwork on an online platform, not showing your face or your personality and not coming forward in the spotlight at all—but just letting the world judge you and like or dislike you on the basis of the work you put forward.

This is when an artist tells themselves—We don’t need to be perfect. It’s fine just being what we are right now, even if it’s not the best yet. We can get better, and better, and then a little more better. And we can be the best.

I’m guessing I helped you a little in figuring out how to let go of this thing called perfectionism, how to forgive yourself for not being perfect, and how perfectionism doesn’t exist at all. If you liked this post, don’t be disappointed that it ended. (I know you are!)

In fact, check out this fantastic, and very awesome post too: The Best Life Advice for The Young “Gen Z” by Gary Vee.

New Reads for YOU!

How to Seek Forgiveness and Be Kind to Yourself?

How to Change The World? (And Maybe End Up Changing Yourself)