Never Perfect

I was never good at colouring inside the lines. It would always be that the colour would run over or that I would not fill it in enough. I remember trying to do it slowly and meticulously so I could get it perfect, and I would feel this immense pressure in my mind to get it right. Sometimes, my intrusive thoughts would tell me to just go over the line and get it over with. Once that happened, then the pressure of achieving perfection would be gone. There was no longer potential for it, so now I could just do my best, and that would be that. I would try to push away those thoughts and continue with the task at hand, painstakingly colouring. Somehow, I always ended up outside the lines, though, and I would feel so disappointed looking at it. No matter how much I tried to fix it with the eraser, you could always tell there was an issue. I mean with an ’80s eraser; you could break the page or leave grey marks even though nothing grey has come in contact with it. That led to me seeing a commercial on TV with the slogan “The rubber that erases everything” and begging my mom for one. Turns out it was a commercial for condoms, and it would not be fit for my needs. There is no perfect audience, eh?

In nature, I always seem to find appealing the bizarre, the uneven, the trees, flowers, or rocks that look like things that they should not be, deformed as they are, they are interesting, and they have an amazing story to tell but when it comes to people, we are attracted to symmetry. The more symmetrical, the more it shows that the genes are strong and healthy, and good offspring can be produced as a result.

For me, the image of elegance was a woman in a smart dress with heels, long hair in a bun with a hat on her head, simple makeup with a black winged eye and perfect red lips, well-manicured red nails just gliding gracefully from place to place. I never felt that I could be that. I tried to be well-groomed and clean, but my clothes always were a bit too tight or too loose, a bit scratchy, with one strap that refused to stay in place. My hair was too thin, lacking volume, and seemed to faint at every attempt to be kept up in a bun unless there were some serious bondage attempts involved and if my scalp was not screaming in agony. I cannot find the symmetry of the black liner. Red lipstick travels, and if I am not careful, it is either on my teeth or around my mouth, portraying the clown that I am. My walk is anything but gliding. I am very feminine in the right outfit, but a breeze I am not. While I enjoy walking in heels and they make me feel so grown up and sexy, it also bores me to tears because I cannot walk as fast as I want to, and I have a bad back, so I cannot stand for extended periods in them. I suppose this is why I enjoyed Miss Congeniality so much. With the right team of trained professionals, I could become the elegant lady that I admire and would like to be, but I would probably fall flat on my face at the first opportunity.

Growing up, I read books where the main character was usually a slender woman with long, flowy hair, perfect skin. The embodiment of perfection. Kind, helpful, and compassionate, so that her character matches her looks. Sure, she is overprotected, naïve, and helpless, but because she was so kind, everybody will jump to her aid.

I played with dolls, and they too were meant to have perfect bodies, measurements of 36-24-36 to scale, with long hair, perfect makeup, walking on high heels for no reason, most of them blonde and blue or green-eyed. Then, you grow up and look at fashion magazines that play on the same idea of perfect skin, perfect symmetrical faces, like live Barbies, and clothes falling perfectly on the body. The same magazines talk about how one should look better, and most of them have at least one diet and one exercise regimen. We sure do like to keep our women busy on how their bodies are not enough.

Can one imagine what we can do with the time not being spent telling ourselves we are not enough?

I would look at those images of perfect skin with not even an ounce of fat, and no cellulite in sight, and take that to the mirror to see that I am not anywhere near that. I was thin at 54 Kg and 1.70m in height, but I have always had cellulite, and due to a growth spurt in adolescence, I have always had stretch marks. The trend when I was a teenager was a liking for big breasts, Pamela Anderson's build, which I did not match since mine were modest at best. Then it moved to the silhouette of a two-by-four, which I did not match again because I was born with those child-baring hips. Now, it moved to having big thighs and big butts which I again do not match somehow. Not a perfect body, not a perfect face, not matching what society deems as classical beauty. I felt so small and insignificant for so long. I felt like other women were so much better than I, and I am nothing special to look at. I will never make men gasp when I walk into a room, stunned by my beauty but, what I realized one day, while I sat in the park people watching is that I do not have to, that love comes in different shapes and sizes and beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder. When I looked in the mirror, I felt disgusted by what I saw, and I only saw the need to improve everything that men were not looking at, or they looked at it and felt that it was amazing. There was an instance where a man looked at my stretch marks while I wished for death, feeling like he would find them disgusting, and he instead just bent down, kissed them, and moved on with his day. It was such a simple gesture that meant nothing to him, most likely, but it made me feel utterly accepted, lit me up inside, and made me feel sexy. I hold on to these types of moments now, and I think to myself, no matter what shape you take, there will always be someone out there ready to love you for who you are.

I was reading Reshma Saujani’s book, “Brave Not Perfect”, and she was saying that girls and boys are raised very differently. Girls are taught from a young age to play it safe, while boys are encouraged to explore, fall, get back up, fail, and try again. As a result, men will be more willing to take risks and will be praised for it, while women will be more inclined to stick with what they know. Thinking about it, girls usually receive dolls as presents, and they are told that those are their babies and that they need to take care of them. Their games are to cook, clean, and be a wife and mother. We are told that we can play, but we must not be loud because that is inappropriate for a young lady. We get told that we must play carefully and stay away from dangerous things because a lady should not have scraped knees. The expectation is that our clothes stay clean and tidy after we play outside. Also, a good girl does not argue; a good girl does as she is told. Girls in my class, myself included, were expected to be quiet, obedient, pay attention, and get good grades. Under the premise that girls matured faster than boys and boys were more inclined to play and not pay attention, it was perfectly acceptable for boys to get a 7 or 8 out of 10, while I would get grilled by my parents as to why I did not get a perfect 10. Then compared with my peers and reminded them how they do so much better than me.

Not only do I have to play by taking care of a family of 4 but I also need to learn how to do things with the women in my family that are meant to be traditions that I will pass on to my family because you can do whatever you want as long as you finish the school we think is worthwhile, get a degree in something respectable, find a husband, buy a house, have a child, then have another because you don’t want them to grow alone. I am not even nine, and I have responsibilities, and I am a carrier of tradition. They tell us that we are delicate and that we must be protected. They tell us that we should stay in our lane and be grateful for what we get. My mother actively told me to accept any job that was offered to me just to have a paycheck, even if it was a minimum wage income, even though I had a university degree and I knew two foreign languages, which would have put me in a position to get quite a good wage. My act of rebellion was to stick it out and not give in to pressure and hold off on a job that paid what I wanted. Another risk was to switch jobs when I was no longer happy with the conditions offered. I also had to prepare myself and go and ask one of my managers for a raise, which my mom had never done.

Growing up, I had been criticised and I had been shamed for making mistakes, so when something happened, I knew exactly what would happen to me. There would be no sparing my feelings, and there would be no appreciation for effort and promises that I should do better next time. I was expected to do well every time. Every mistake would do the rounds in the family, and then my mom and dad would be shamed by their parents for their parenting style and failure, so my parents added shame to their disappointment and added pressure to me. Support and gentle parenting were not a thing, but you would get something bordering on bullying. Here is an example: in an attempt to please my parents, I tried to clean everybody’s shoes and polish them. When they came back home, I showed them what I had done, and I put my best effort into it. My dad seemed angry, and my mom sighed and rolled her eyes, and told me I did not need to do it. Somehow in our house appeared a book about a couple of baby bears that tried to clean their shoes and made a complete mess and then got completely distracted. As they were telling their grandmother what happened, there was this line that stuck with me:” ‘We only wanted to do a good deed, ’ they said while sobbing.” My parents dropped a hint… when I tried to help my mother and do the dishes for her, she got angry and told me that I did not need to do that as it was her task. Not even my dad can do it to her standards, so I should not try, and then she washed them again herself immediately. Your help is not wanted, nor needed, was a well-rehearsed chorus in my house.

All of this made me push myself and try to get the best results in everything that I do, and work as hard as I need to get the job done, no matter if the extra effort will break me. I started working in the corporate environment, and we were told that covering your job requirements did not get you a raise. One would have to do stretch activities on top of an excellent day-to-day performance. I did find that my not-good-enough wound worked perfectly in achieving performance because I felt the need to do more and try to be perfect at it to prove myself. One is told that we need to be better and do more than last year, but that we will also be compared against each other, and even though I might have improved, it might still not be good enough for a high raise. There are my corporate parents, comparing me again with my corporate family. Getting things wrong and having to go and admit it was soul-crushing because this would become palpable proof that I am indeed not good enough. The shame would start recruiting more of my thoughts and activate that imposter syndrome, and it comes into the room ready to hurt me more than anybody else ever could. It mockingly looks at me and says, “Look at you. You thought you were the shit and turns out you are not even a fart. Did you think that you had what it took? You do not. You never did. You will never be anything. You will never amount to anything. Now go and tell them what you did and how you are going to fix it, and hope they do not fire you.” That teaches me not only to second-guess everything that I am doing and triple-check before sending files, but it also teaches me that I should not take on new things, minimising the chances of this happening again. I have never made a mistake that could not be fixed in a day or so, but still, the spiral continues. Albert Einstein said, “A person who has never made a mistake has never tried everything known.”

I catch myself trying to be perfect when it comes to my house. As soon as people are meant to come to visit, I try to clean this house from top to bottom, and I also get cupboards that I have not opened in ages and organise them. Who are these people who are coming to look through all my stuff? It is yet unclear, but I need to clean every surface just in case people check that one corner that I forgot. I am meant to be the perfect host. I am meant to have everything that my guests ever wanted. My house is meant to be spotless. I am meant to be the perfect cook as well, if anybody eats with me. I never say that I am a good cook because I feel that if I mess up, I will be mocked, so I just say that I can feed people and leave them to decide based on the results of the day.

There were so many things that I had to learn to do on my own. So many things that I had never tried before and just had to be done. To some, they are trivial things like finding a new flat to live in but I didn’t know the process so that seemed like such a daunting thing and most of all I was scared that if I made the wrong decision, I would get stuck and I wouldn’t be able to solve the problem. That made me so afraid of even starting to look for something, but there was no doubt about it; it had to be done. So, I tried to learn as much as I could about the process, ask for advice, and get on with it. Did I enjoy it? NO! Did it go smoothly? Also, NO! It got done, though. The first time was an absolute dumpster fire, but I got to go through the entire process myself, and I knew what to expect, and I knew what changes I needed to make to improve the process. At the end of the day, no one would come to my rescue, so I had to be catapulted out of my comfort zone. I just had to get used to the fact that it is not perfect, but it is done, and it is still a functional result. That it is okay to make mistakes, that it is okay to pivot, and that it is okay to change the plan if it is not working with the current conditions. It was not easy to push down the fear and the shame, but I can accept that I will feel horrible at times, and I will break down and cry, get up, and continue with the task at hand. I had to do it on my own, and I had to learn to be brave.

I wish I could be the girl who has time to work out and have a perfect figure, which is always perfectly put together from the top of my head to my baby toe. I have perfect style, and everything fits me amazingly. I wish I had perfect skin, and I did have a skincare routine, but I do not. I wish that I could clean this house and not miss any spots every time. I wish I had the perfect job where I would be brilliant and that I would have a clear career plan that just falls in place perfectly. I wish that I would be able to find a great man with whom I can have a wonderful marriage and I would be an amazing and understanding wife at all times I can be open and empathic while being able to give wise advice while cooking meals from scratch every day and then be a porn star at night. Be able to have children whom I parent gently, and they will grow up to be perfectly adjusted cherubs who can achieve their full potential. I wish all of that could be possible. Most of all, I wish there were a recipe to start wishing for perfection. All I know so far is that all you can do is your best, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it just fails monumentally. The best stories are about things that you tried or realisations that some things may not be for you and need to be let go. Kindness to myself that matches the same grace that I have for others is the goal. A little bit of bravery, starting small and then just pushing the boat out a bit further every day, I find, is the way to go. Also, trying not to be fully invested in the result but having curiosity about the process and being fully present is a challenge. The reality is that I will never be perfect, but being absolutely and unapologetically me and trying my best every single time is indeed my idea of perfection.