To Be Perfectly Imperfect
It’s a cheesy cliche to say “everybody is perfect in their own way,” and in my honest opinion, that’s not true. My entire life, I thought my sister was perfect, but she’s not. It was only about two years ago that I came to this realization. She was always the golden child. She followed the rules, had lots of friends and was good in school. She went to Cuba to play softball, she was in the newspaper, she was on the teen city council and even has a plaque in our middle school principal’s office for winning class president. Growing up, I didn’t know if I wanted to mirror her every move or become the very opposite of her.
In my mother’s words, I’m a handful and an actual pain. I am not the perfect child, and to be completely honest, after a certain point, I didn’t want to be. I tried to be just like my sister: I ran for class president, I played three sports at once and I got straight A’s all three years of middle school. Yet nothing changed, and I found myself still just below my sister. Just a little less worth, just still not enough. After all my effort at trying to be perfect, I became the polar opposite of my sister. Maybe I took that too far considering I’m gay, but I mean complete and utter opposites. I know I make life difficult for my parents much of the time, I pierce myself, I’m barely ever home, I go out places I didn’t know existed with people I don’t know the names of. I became a problem child because society sets an image of perfection in a child’s mind and when that ideal is not reached, it makes it difficult for us to amount to anything when we are forced to build our self worth from scratch.
I wouldn’t like to think of myself as perfect. I have many flaws… the way I talk, stand, and walk. I put too much trust into people and I’m bad at giving space. I wasn’t confident and I was so focused on the miniscule factors of my life. I realized that I had to let go of the mindset I had been stuck in for so many years in order to appreciate who I was and improve myself without the drive to be deemed worthy in the eyes of others. It took me losing trust in about six family members, breaking up with my partner of about a year and a half and coming to terms with the fact that I only had one actual friend to realize my self worth.
Nothing is perfect, and to create the illusion that such an ideal could exist, is a misconception because “perfection” in its simplest form is impossible to achieve. There will always be someone or something “better”, whether that’s in school, sports, family, or jobs. We focus so much on comparing ourselves to the people around us because competition is what our society is built on. It is dangerous, and when we don’t understand where the line is we let this competitive idea of losing consume us.
In society today, the idea of something being perfect is deceiving. Most people don’t understand that without flaws, there is no individuality. It is our flaws that make us unique, they make us equal because everybody has one. Humans were made to be imperfect inherently. To believe in a perfect human would be delusional, because if anyone was perfect, they wouldn’t be human at all.
