Strength Comes from Acceptance

Do you reach to control every situation, every corner of your life? Have you pushed to be flawless at whatever you take on, and then felt let down when the outcome missed the plan you had in your head? If any of that sounds familiar, there's a good chance perfectionism has its hooks in you. And if you're anything like I used to be (and sometimes still am), it may have more than hooks.

What's strange is that for most of my life I never would have called myself a perfectionist. It felt more like the opposite, like I couldn't get anything right. About four years ago, after getting sober, the real picture came into focus. The reason nothing ever felt right wasn't that I failed at everything. It was that things rarely unfolded the exact way I had decided they should.

The single most useful thing I've picked up since then: real strength comes from accepting that you cannot be perfect. That acceptance isn't passive. It asks for effort, and it asks you to actually commit to changing how you operate. You can do certain things perfectly. You, as a whole human being, will never be perfect. Nobody is.

Perfectionism quietly stalls your growth almost everywhere it shows up. For years I lived inside it. I was never perfect, but I believed everything around me could be, and I kept chasing that. It can't be done. What I feel now, the steadiness that comes from letting that belief go, is hard to describe. I'd like other people to feel it too.

A good starting point is to name and own both your weaknesses and your strengths. Every person alive has a mix of the two. Write yours down. Then practice claiming them, over and over, day after day, until they settle in and stop feeling like confessions. Once that lands, you can start working on the deeper pull toward wanting to be perfect.

Another thing that helped me, and it sounds odd: do things differently from how you planned, on purpose. My worst moments came from plans not matching reality. So I started deliberately changing course on small things. The first few months were rough. Sometimes I got angrier, not calmer. But slowly my nervous system learned that a plan can shift without the whole thing turning into what I used to call a freak out. Try it, and the lesson sticks.

The biggest piece of all is learning to love who you are. After years of tearing myself down for supposedly ruining things, my self-esteem had almost nothing left. I had to learn, actively learn, to love myself as I already was. A lot of people have to learn this, and there's no shame in that. Celebrate your wins. Make time for fun. Do the things you actually enjoy. Those are not small gestures.

Life isn't perfect and neither is any person walking around in it, and you can still build a happy life anyway. That's what these habits taught me. I'm not perfect, and that takes nothing away from my ability to love myself and feel good about my days. You're a good human. That part is what counts. - Cara