Can’t you just take a break from being amazing?

September 30, 2016 3:17 PM

Perfection is unattractive and unrelatable and unsustainable.

I understand we’re all actors and we’re all on stage and we’re all playing parts. But I have limited patience for people who carefully curate themselves as flawless little universes with zero dark matter, whose faces are glossed over with the veneer of perfection and order.

Can’t you just take a break from being amazing?

Can’t you just admit and accept and own the fact that you have cracks just like everyone else?

I’m not trying to be the vulnerability police here, but those who uphold perfection are turning their backs on real life. Those who refuse to share their mistakes and failures and anxieties and pains aren’t fooling anyone. It’s time to call bullshit on these social thespians.

Jourard’s classic discourse on interpersonal disclosure pointed this out more than forty years ago. He said we display our love by letting others know us. And when we disclose our imperfect experience to another, fully, spontaneously and honestly, the mystery that we are decreases enormously.

That’s what perfectionists don’t realize. Vulnerability is the door through which all humans must pass to open the next horizon of their lives.

It may be messy, but that’s the whole point. We’re just animals in fancy clothes.

And we can only protect others from who we really are for so long.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Which of your imperfections are you keeping in exile?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…

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Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.

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