...about perfection

There is this odd, very pervasive and very compelling idea that one must be perfect. 

Oddly enough, exactly what embodies "perfection" is never well defined. 

 It starts when we are young. You go to school or the playground and something is different about you--your shoes, your name, your clothes, the words you say--could be anything. 

And different is bad. Different is not perfect. And you get laughed at. You get teased. 

The idea we got as children is that there is a state of perfection, we are expected to be perfect, but we don't know what that is, and cannot find out. 

 As an example: Joe teases you because you dress differently. You then exactly copy Joe's clothes, and he teases you because you are copying him. 

Few children have any defense against this kind of attack. And the lesson learned from this kind of abuse is "you are imperfect, you are bad, suppress anything unique and special." 

This isn't just the other children who promote this false idea of perfection. Parents and other adults punish children for doing things that the children don't know are wrong. 

There is a vast number of things, many unwritten, that society frowns on. As a child you can be punished for things you never knew. 

But this is not constrained to when you are young. This will continue through your entire life. You will still, occasionally, be taken to task for not being perfect, and the definition of perfection will be different for every situation and every person.

If you don't develop some kind of understanding and defense against this, it can lead to and incredibly horrible life. It is difficult to avoid the idea that you must always be perfect -- based on other people's definition of perfection -- because this indoctrination begins at such a young age and that tends to form our personality.

It becomes invisibly and insidiously ingrained into our personalities, into our habits and customs. We look to others for approval and validation. We look to those around us to tell us how we should look, how we should act, what we should say. 

And we think of ourselves, always, as flawed, imperfect, inadequate. 

Created from the youngest age and installed unconsciously into the fabric of how we live and how we think, this is a lie, but, at the same time, one of the foundations of our personality. 

Does this mean we should become a society of anti-social people, doing only what each wants, and to hell with other's opinions? 

Hardly. But most folks are a long, long, long way from that personality. 

What it means is that we should consider ourselves as perfect, with all our errors and warts. We each are perfectly "me". 

Make an error, break something, hurt someone, well, fix it if you can. If possible, and if you want, try not to repeat that thing. But do not, ever, ever think that you are flawed or wrong or bad. Just fix it if you can and go on being you, being perfect.