Best We Can Do

"He accepts me for who I am and loves me for being my best. Even if the best I have to offer the world today is laying in bed, crying and eating cake. And knowing that he'll still love me like that makes it so that my best is rarely ever that."
A wise woman said this to me last night, as she talked to me about why it is that she finally realized that her fiance was the one she wanted to marry.  "We know the other one isn't perfect. And in knowing that, we support each other in just being the best that we can be, no matter how imperfect that may be."

This idea of perfection has been plaguing me for quite a long time now.  And I don't think I'm alone. If, as a society, we didn't have issues with perfectionism, we wouldn't have cosmetic technology, silly exercise equipment, diet pills, etc, etc. This is not breaking news, I concede.

However, what is breaking new to me, is this idea of being accepted by someone without being perfect.  What does that even mean? Perfect. As if there's some norm that we all have to standardize to.  Physically, yes, but emotionally, as well. I mean, I was talking to another friend today, and she was indicating that she basically puts everyone else's needs before her own. And everything in my being was wanting to counsel her to stop doing that. That she needs to take care of herself and stop letting people take advantage of her vulnerabilities.  And if something really dangerous was happening to her, yeah, it makes sense what I was wanting to say to her.  But she asked me, "Well, if I wasn't constantly driving my family around and doing their errands, etc, what would I be doing instead? It doesn't make me unhappy to do these things. It's annoying, but I don't really care."  I realized that I was trying to get her to conform to some ideal of perfection, as if there was some formula for how many times per month she should do errands for her family in order to put her in perfect mental health balance.  As if there's such thing as a perfect balance between giving and taking that we should all achieve. We are all different creatures, right? Right. And I need to remember that when I try to hold the people I know to some non-existent standard.

Furthermore, I think about the perfection ideals to which I hold myself. As if I, too, am trying to reach that  point where I am perfectly emotionally balanced, mentally healthy, physically beautiful, and intellectually ideal according to some rating system. I make myself believe that if I don't score all 10s in each category, then I am somehow unacceptably deficient.   And while rationally, I know that having unattainably high expectations for myself is really a detriment to my happiness, emotionally, I find it hard to lower the bar.  In truth, I've mostly felt that if I don't reach this level of perfection, than I'll not find a companion who really wants to be with me. And, again, rationally, do I want to be with someone who is that shallow? No. But emotionally, it's hard to reconcile. 

I have to say, though, that after talking to my friend last night, I feel a little more hopeful that I will find someone who will not only accept me as I am, all the idiosyncrasies and imperfections, but will also cherish me for those imperfections. It's been a very long road for me to actually believe this. And I'm not sure I still actually do believe it. But I would like to think that as soon as I can tell myself, "Becky, you're doing the best you can. I love you for everything that you are, and I don't worry about the things that you're not," then I think I'll hear it from someone else.

I suppose that the more I focus on all the things I don't like about myself, the more I'm going to put that energy out into the universe and the more it's going to come back to me.  I write as if I hate myself. I definitely don't. But I give too much power to the mostly insignificant "imperfections" that I feel I need to fix before anyone could really accept me. (And here's the real honesty: it's all about physical appearance. Which my rational mind keeps trying to squash, but the emotional mind is so much stronger in this one area. Stupid toxic society in which we live!)

So after all that, here's the take home message: We're all doing the best we can.  We should love ourselves and forget about this idea of perfection.  And when we're dealing with other people, we should remember that they are doing the best they can, and maybe think about dropping our collective guard and overlooking their imperfections.