You are not here to be perfect.
In fact, the universe does not allow perfection. Without breaks and gaps, there would be no growth. Nature depends on imperfection. Fault lines make mountains, star implosions become supernovas, the death of one season creates the rebirth of the next.
You are not here to live up to the exact, precise expectation that you’ve mustered up in your head. You are not here to do everything precisely right, and precisely on time. To do so would require stripping your life of spontaneity, curiosity, and awe.
You are not here to spend your entire life fixing every part of you until the pieces, altogether, create a whole.
You are not here to be perfect, but you are here to be better. You are here to learn. You are here to feel. You are here to take what’s happened and extract wisdom from it. You are here to see what the world is and decide how you could create a better one within it. You are here to evolve. You are here to become.
You’re here to be better and you know you’re here to be better because you feel uncomfortable when you aren’t progressing. Your life comes to a standstill when you get stuck in old experiences and expectations. Often, the very moment in which we aren’t moving forward is the one that we start striving for perfection in the first place.
Instead of the real growth of being human, we decide to become a mold of ourselves, one who is infallible, untouchable, resistant to everything that makes us human.
That is really what we want when we want to be perfect. We want to stop feeling. We want a picture that we can paint each day in our heads that will make all the unknown and the mystery disappear. Within perfection is precision. It is regularity and routine. It is known, it is clear, and in a sense, it is easy. In the end, we all crave that. It is easy to think that striving for this is the answer.
Of course, we can never quite arrive, because we can never really rid ourselves of what we fundamentally are. We try to avoid feeling broken by chasing perfection and yet the very pursuit of perfection leaves us always feeling broken.
There is another way, and it is to see life for what it is. It is to revel in it, marvel at it, and be one with it. It is to honor the darkness and then be awestruck by the light. It is the process of releasing everything we think we should be so we can start showing up exactly as we are.
It is discovering that where we find the fear is where we find the beauty; where we are most uncomfortable is the fertile breeding ground of our lives. We are not meant to pretend we do not have to go there. We are meant to enter, open-hearted, and willing to be changed.
You are not here to be perfect.
So please stop trying to fix every little piece of yourself as though you can crack some formula that will free you. This will not do it. This will not make you the person you want to be.
The measure of your life is how deeply and wholly you are alive within it. How much you lean into your faults and gaps, and see within them potential and growth. It is not whether you mentally decide you’re good enough to experience your life, but whether you show up anyway, feel good anyway, be awed anyway, cry anyway, try anyway, and claim all that worth for your own. It was always yours, always there, ready for your own taking.
THOUGHT CATALOG