Читать книгу Trusting Yourself - M. J. Ryan - Страница 17

If the derelicts and ragamuffins Jesus hung out with were good enough for Jesus, then so am I.

—Esther Armstrong

I have a friend, let's call her Allison. Her house is always impeccable, even if you drop in unexpectedly. She is always tastefully dressed and coiffed, even to go to the park with her children. Her husband is an extremely successful businessman. She has an interesting part-time career as a freelance writer.

Sounds like a wonderful life, right? Yet Allison is miserable most of the time. In her eyes, her house is never clean enough, her accomplishments never good enough. She is perpetually fearful of making a mistake and constantly anxious that she is not measuring up to some standard that she can't even articulate.

Does Allison sound familiar? Do you freak out if your child leaves a dirty sock on the floor? Do you hyperventilate if your layer cake is lopsided? Are you afraid to try something new because you are not good at it already? If so, you more than likely are caught by the demon of perfectionism. Inside that demon is the great fear that we are not enough in and of ourselves. If we slip up, it will be proof that we are worthless. So we try to control our fear by being perfect: perfect looks (hence all the cosmetic surgery), perfect parents (hence all the anxiety over whether our preschooler will get into Harvard in fifteen years), perfect spouses (hence all the articles telling us how to be hot in bed), perfect leaders at work (with the list of twenty or so leadership competencies that we are evaluated on yearly).

Perfection is impossible. Each of us will stumble over and over; each of us will not measure up against the hypothetical yardstick of the quintessential parent, spouse, worker. Yet so many of us continue to try—and beat ourselves up relentlessly when we fall short.

Perfectionism carries a huge price—in the ways we treat ourselves, our spouses, and kids. As Kathy Cordova, author of Let Go, Let Miracles Happen, puts it: “Perfectionism makes the strong tyrants and the weak passive. It either drives you to bully yourself and others with your demands or to retreat to your comfort zone, afraid of taking the risk of failure.”

Perfectionism keeps our world small because it doesn't allow us to learn and therefore grow. We agonize over decisions in advance because we are so afraid of doing it wrong. We hold others to impossible standards. We're fearful we'll be discovered to be an impostor. We actually do less than other people because we're so concerned with doing the task perfectly that we do hardly anything at all. We get no pleasure from our successes because all we can see is how we could have done better.

When we trust ourselves, we know that we are good enough as we are—with our gifts and strengths, with our foibles and failings. We are not fearful of making a mistake because we know we'll survive, maybe even grow from the experience. We believe that what we have to offer—our essence—is what is being called for. Not the perfect chocolate flambé at the potluck or the perfect presentation at work.

After struggling with my desire for sainthood the first half of my life, I've come to truly believe that all that is being asked of each of us is to be as real as we can be. To become fully ourselves and to offer that fullness to the rest of the world. That's no small task; indeed, it is the ongoing work of our lifetime. But it certainly is much easier—on us and others—than striving for perfection. It frees up so much time, energy, and joy—and can't we use a whole lot more of those three qualities in our stressed-out lives?

This particular gift has come none too soon in my life. I am currently experiencing, to put it nicely, the short-term memory problems that often accompany menopause. Today I left my ATM card at the bank, spent fifteen minutes searching unsuccessfully for my computer glasses, and still can't find the folder with all my notes on perfectionism that I've been collecting for the past two years. In other words, I'm having a human day. I know I'll survive. And dealing with my screwups is so much easier without the added burden of being perfect. Care to join me in being perfectly imperfect?