Chasing the Impossible

Nothing is impossible. If you can dream it, you can live it. You can do anything if you put your mind to it.
Wonderful words of wisdom and they are very motivating and encouraging. However, they are not true. There is something that is impossible and no amount of effort will get you there. You can dream about it all day long and all night long if you want. It is a fruitless and futile endeavor. You will never reach this dream. What exactly am I referring to? Perfection. Plain and simply put, perfection is an impossibility that none of us have never reached and will never reach. You can spend the rest of your days trying to get there but you will fail and will fail miserably.

And I know this from first hand experience. You see, when I was younger I spent all my time chasing after perfection. Thinking that being perfect was how to fit in and be a part of the crowd, I became obsessed with making myself perfect or at least thinking that I wasn't perfect and that was what was wrong with me. I thought my weakness and what made me so unlikable growing up was my inability to be perfect or say the perfect thing or wear the perfect clothes. I tried desperately to belong and fit in. And I would get rejected time and again. And so my thinking was I am just not trying hard enough cause I am obviously not perfect enough. I have to go buy more clothes and I have to wear better clothes. I just have to get up on that pedestal of perfection or I will never be anything of significance. I am nothing without perfection. That was how I thought and felt at the time. And I would spend endless nights crying myself to sleep after cursing myself in the mirror for not reaching that goal. I would hate myself for not being perfect and what they needed me to be. I was hell bent on being perfect and I would get there or die trying.

And yet as of today sitting here writing this, I have still not attained perfection.I have still not become flawless or without faults. I still have blemishes and I am still damaged. I am imperfect as can be, and you know what? I am proud of that. I embrace it and accept it because why would I want to be perfect? How boring would I be then? How predictable would I be? The longer I have lived, the more I know that true beauty does not lie in perfection, but rather in the imperfection. The imperfection is where the passion and the joy comes from. Because imperfection is a lot less safe or boring than perfection. And I can't stand to be bored. So I may be imperfect but I am not boring, and that makes me okay with not being up on that perfect pedestal that I once craved above and beyond anything else. And I also now know that I am somebody and I am special. I am not nothing just because I am imperfect. In fact, I now know that I am beautiful and part of that is BECAUSE of my imperfectness. People love me because of my imperfections. And I love them the same way. I don't want them to change because I love who they are as individuals and that includes their flaws. I don't love them any less because of those things. I probably love them even more. So I have come a long way from hating myself for not being perfect to loving myself for being far from it.

It is so amazing how much time I spent wasting trying to be perfect. I can't believe how much I longed for perfection to come my way. The money and the effort I wasted trying to be something I was not and was never going to be. I should have just accepted the blemishes, the faults, the spots and all a long time ago as I believe my life may have been much happier that way. But I guess I wasn't supposed to find all this out that soon. Everything happens for a reason and though I don't really know the why, I don't need to. I just know that I no longer spend one single second trying to chase down an impossible dream. It is a game I will never win and I am far too competitive of a person to enter into that type of game. I no longer want to be perfect at all. I want to be the very best of who I am and I understand that even then, at my very best, I am still loaded down with imperfection. But I am okay with that. I no longer view imperfection as a weakness. It is a part of me and I am beautiful and I am wonderful and being imperfect is part of that package. So I no longer chase after something that won't make me any happier than I am right this second. There is joy in the imperfection and beauty in the chaos.Imperfection is what makes life worth living. It is what adds variety and unpredictability and beauty into the world. Imagine a world where we were all perfect and all thought the same and acted the same "perfect" way. I would be far less happy then because I would be bored out of my mind. So I don't know what the rest of you want to do, but  I know that I am going to spend the rest of my life enjoying each and every last minute I get no matter how full of imperfection it may be. I am not perfect and I thank god every day for that. I am a fucking hell of a lot happier and better off now than I was whenever I was trying to chase that impossible dream of being perfect. I am not perfect..........and that is perfectly fine with me!!

Until next time
Take it easy
Mel