Perfectionism. I’ve struggled with it my whole life. To this day I can still see 5-year-old me being so upset after I’d finished coloring a picture of Dopey in a Disney coloring book. I’d chosen brown for the color of his skin, while my mom had colored another one of the Seven Dwarfs with more of a flesh-toned, pinkish hue. In the moment I felt so wrong, like such a failure. I cried and cried and wanted so badly to go back and erase it all and redo it like mom’s and I couldn’t. Mom was so kind and patient in trying to console me but at that moment, I was beyond anything she could offer in words or motherly presence.
Years later I took guitar lessons with a really talented and patient instructor. He could coax such smooth accuracy and tone out of his axe. It was so frustrating for me as I fumbled through whatever track we were working on, my strings producing nothing even close to what my ears hoped to hear. I found it so hard to practice. My mind and my hands at total odds with each other on every measure. Every mistake a glaring reminder how much skill I lacked and how far away I was from ever being a guitarist that anyone would listen to for free, let alone perhaps someday pay money to hear. I should have been able to step back and accept it all as part of the learning process, but the perfectionist in me just cringed at every bad note until I could hardly bear to pick another string.
For as long as I can remember the need to always have everything colored inside the lines with the right color, or matched note for note with perfect tone and timing, has been a constant. Some combination of needing to feel completely capable, a need for control of the world around me, and an overdeveloped sense of idealism has always driven my expectations way beyond reasonable. And the ensuing inevitable disappointment has led to many a self-inflicted emotional beatdown far beyond those post-Dopey coloring blues. It’s in the midst of one of those beatdowns that I humbly come to the keyboard to offer the words you’re reading right now.
Placing an expectation of perfection on people is far more dangerous and destructive. Expecting perfection of ourselves will harm our self-worth, short-circuit the process of learning, growing, and refining our gifts and talents, and rob us of the joy of so many experiences that life has to offer. Expecting perfection of others is far more harmful. Only one perfect person ever walked the earth, and it’s only in Him that we can hope to be one day perfected. As long as we walk the earth we will always fall far short of our own and others’ expectations of us, and others will always fall short of ours. When we lose sight of that, either out of a desire to try to pump ourselves up or to have our world run in the smooth and orderly way we’ve come to think it should, we risk losing our grip on the things we should value the most: our relationships.
Expecting perfection of strangers, whether it’s the dude driving in front of us or the gal behind the counter helping us change our mobile phone plan, just adds needless frustration and negativity to our lives. Expecting perfection out of those closest to us whom we love most dearly has far worse consequences. Even if objectively we can agree that someone’s behavior is less than ideal, the sheer act of “needing to vent” puts us on the slipperiest of slopes. Could be that their flaws shine a brighter light on ours and we’re too uncomfortable to deal with it. Or when their actions conflict with our idea of how the world should work best, resentment and fault-finding result. From the dawn of time we’ve always had the need to feel like there’s at least someone out there not as good as us. Lord knows, whole Christian denominations have sprung up from that notion. So maybe pride triggers us to look down at them: we’ve got our shit together, why don’t they?
I’ve posted on here in the past about taming our tongues and about restraining ourselves from judgement. When both of those are lacking they intersect in ways that even if we feel justified in the moment, can cause lasting damage to our most treasured relationships. We need to pray constantly for God to help us with both. We are all broken. Grace is perhaps the greatest gift that God has offered to us. It’s the gift we need the most. We need to be ever mindful of that, passing that grace through to all around us, including ourselves. As a recovering perfectionist I know how hard it is to give myself grace. We can’t be perfect even in that, or in giving grace to others. But that’s where the Holy Spirit does his best work. When we come clean about our own brokenness, God’s perfection shines through.
We’re all children of God. He made us all, He loves us all, and He knows us perfectly, top to bottom, inside and out. Imagine if God reacted to our faults the way we react to others’. We’d be doomed. Just as God’s love overlooks all our flaws and shortcomings, we too must never forget that our loved ones’ actions and personality quirks, and even how they relate to us is all part of who they are. Otherwise we risk losing sight of their humanity in those moments.
Here’s hoping today we can all lean into God to help us make peace with the imperfection in us and the people and world around us. Because the relentless pursuit of perfection might be fine for Lexus, but for us as God’s imperfect but beloved children, it’s nothing but a dead end journey to the edge of a very painful cliff.